Re: Java virtual machine as target language for C/C++

Dave Love <d.love@daresbury.ac.uk> writes:


d> Are meaningful comparisons available from compilers which can both
d> generate native code and go via C (GHC and Gambit, perhaps)?


Something may have changed since I worked on GHC, but at least when I
was at Glasgow, GHC didn't really generate native code. What it did
instead was, on particular architectures, coerce GCC into putting
certain global variables used by the runtime system into registers.


This made a tremendous difference to performance on machines that had
plenty of GPRs available, but platforms such as the x86 (and, to a
lesser extent, SPARC) with few GPRs couldn't easily be dealt with in
this way since they tended to run out of registers for use as
temporaries, thereby killing performance.


My understanding is that the Mercury compiler uses a similar scheme to
improve performance; maybe Fergus Henderson can expand on this.


<b


--
bos@eng.sun.com
bos@serpentine.com
http://www.serpentine.com/~bos
--

Return to the comp.compilers page.
Search the comp.compilers archives again.