Re: Which target language do I choose?

A few comments on Henry Spencer's post:


Most implementors that rely on a C/C++ compiler for their intermediate code
seem to end up relying on GCC as C is not quite a flexible as they want and C++
implementations are too variable in what they support. This means that their
portability is essentially equivalent to that of the gcc system. This suggests
that they would not be harmed by considering other languages supported by gcc.
Of these the most obvious option is the GNAT Ada compiler, but perhaps the
extended Pascal compiler is also useful.


I suspect Fortran 90 availability is rapidly increasing, particularly if you
count the subset languages. However, Fortran is an odd case for an
implementation, primarilly because of some of its argument passing semantics.
In many ways the argument passing semantics map well to functional languages,
however the semantics of FUNCTION calls (i.e., only the value returned is
important and any other side effects may be ignored), means that an
implementation of garbage collection would probably have to translate function
calls to subroutine calls to maintain the state necessary to keep track of the
garbage.


William B. Clodius




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