Re: Mixing languages

Richard A. O'Keefe writes
>
> This is exactly what Sun are doing with Java. They compile to a portable
> stack machine bytecode format, but for real performance they have a back end
> that converts that to native code. It isn't terribly hard to write a back
> end that can do a *lot* better than even a threaded interpreter, even if it
> is not quite what a highly optimising native-through-and-through compiler
> might achieve.


Why reinvent the wheel with another VM/BYTECODE system? Use a subset of
the Intel x86 instruction set and write *ONE* portable emulator for
non-Intel machines. This "bytecode" is supported in hardware by 90% of
the world's computers. ;^)
(Actually I think the x86 is a tired, old instruction set; a poor register
set, etc. but it is the most widely used and is not going away, sigh...)


I would like to see GCC packaged as a linkable library (or a server) so we
can call a function (imagine some thing like "void* GCC_compile(RTL
expression)") with a RTL tree and have it return a function pointer!


Has any one designed an embeddable, portable, retargetable "compiler"
library?


All the best,
Kurt Stephens
stephens@il.us.swissbank.com
--

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