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<P><FONT face="Times New Roman">May I remind you Norman Ramsey’s opinion on the
subject:</FONT></P>
<P><FONT face="Times New Roman"></FONT> </P>
<P><FONT face="Times New Roman">Code generation is my business :-)</FONT></P>
<P><FONT face="Times New Roman">Comments on a few options:</FONT></P>
<UL>
<LI>
<P><FONT face="Times New Roman">CLR: </FONT></P>
<UL>
<LI><FONT face="Times New Roman">Pro: industrial support</FONT>
<LI><FONT face="Times New Roman">Con: you have to buy into their type system
pretty much completely; depending on what you want to do with types, this
may not matter</FONT>
<LI><FONT face="Times New Roman">Con: Only Windows platform is really
prime-time quality</FONT></LI></UL>
<LI>
<P><FONT face="Times New Roman">LLVM:</FONT></P>
<UL>
<LI><FONT face="Times New Roman">Pro: enthusiastic user community with
charismatic leader</FONT>
<LI><FONT face="Times New Roman">Pro: many interesting performance
improvements</FONT>
<LI><FONT face="Times New Roman">Con: somewhat complex interface</FONT>
<LI><FONT face="Times New Roman">Con: history of holes in the engineering;
as LLVM matures expect the holes in the engineering to be plugged by adding
to the complexity of the interface</FONT></LI></UL>
<LI>
<P><A style='href: "http://www.cminusminus.org/"'><FONT
face="Times New Roman">C--</FONT></A></P>
<UL>
<LI><FONT face="Times New Roman">Pro: target is an actual written language,
not an API; you can easily inspect, debug, and edit your C-- code</FONT>
<LI><FONT face="Times New Roman">Pro: design is reasonably mature and
reasonably clean</FONT>
<LI><FONT face="Times New Roman">Pro: supports accurate garbage
collection</FONT>
<LI><FONT face="Times New Roman">Pro: most users report it is very easy to
use</FONT>
<LI><FONT face="Times New Roman">Con: very small development team</FONT>
<LI><FONT face="Times New Roman">Con: as of early 2009, supports only three
hardware platforms (x86, PPC, ARM)</FONT>
<LI><FONT face="Times New Roman">Con: does not ship with a garbage
collector</FONT>
<LI><FONT face="Times New Roman">Con: future of project is
uncertain</FONT></LI></UL>
<LI>
<P><FONT face="Times New Roman">C as target language</FONT></P>
<UL>
<LI><FONT face="Times New Roman">Pro: looks easy</FONT>
<LI><FONT face="Times New Roman">Con: nearly impossible to get decent
performance</FONT>
<LI><FONT face="Times New Roman">Con: will drive you nuts in the long run;
ask the long line of people who have tried to compile Haskell, ML, Modula-3,
Scheme and more using this technique. At some point every one of these
people gave up and built their own native code
generator.</FONT></LI></UL></LI></UL>
<P><FONT face="Times New Roman">Summary: <STRONG>anything except C</STRONG> is a
reasonable choice. For the best combination of flexibility, quality, and
expected longevity, I'd probably recommend LLVM. But your example code is very
close to C--, so that may be an advantage.</FONT></P>
<P><FONT face="Times New Roman">Full disclosure: I am affiliated with the C--
project.</FONT></P></DIV>
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<DIV style="font-color: black"><B>From:</B> <A title=jay.krell@cornell.edu
href="mailto:jay.krell@cornell.edu">Jay K</A> </DIV>
<DIV><B>Sent:</B> Saturday, July 18, 2015 10:27 AM</DIV>
<DIV><B>To:</B> <A title=m3devel@elegosoft.com
href="mailto:m3devel@elegosoft.com">m3devel</A> </DIV>
<DIV><B>Subject:</B> [M3devel] switching to C backend?</DIV></DIV></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV></DIV>
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<DIV dir=ltr>Any objection if I start switching targets to the C backend?
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>In par<SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt">ticular, Darwin does not support m3gdb,
so debuggability is not a factor.</SPAN></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Thanks,</DIV>
<DIV>- Jay<BR><BR></DIV><BR><BR></DIV>
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