[M3devel] LINUXLIBC6

[Hendrik Boom]

On Mon, May 21, 2012 at 02:43:17PM -0400, Hendrik Boom wrote:
> On Mon, May 21, 2012 at 07:50:49AM +0000, Jay K wrote:
> > 
> > Nevermind..I'm not making a clear point..
> 
> Maybe this point will do:
> 
> So regardless of whether the production compiler generates machine code 
> or anythine else, it would be possible to have a single, portable 
> interpreter written in C to use as a bootstrap tool to avoid having to 
> bootstrap from machine-dependent machine code whenever installing (or 
> packaging) foor another platform?  The build-dependency of the real 
> Modula 3 compiler could then be itself OR the interpreter.
> 
> And the interpreter could be made to interpret some kind of efficient, 
> intermediate code that is easy to interpret fast.  Does the existing 
> codebase have anything that sould be used for this?  OR could easily be 
> changed into this?
> 
> -- hendrik

C--, I believe, is implemented as a compiler for several platforms, and 
also as an interpreter.  So generating C-- code would satisfy our 
requirements for a bootstrap.  If we want to hook into a run-time 
system that has at least thought seriously about the issues of 
garbage-collection and stack-walking, this might be it.  But I don't 
know to what extent these essential features have beein implemented. 

OCAML also had an interpreter and compilers to several machine codes.  
This would seem to be a viable mechanism.

I've been using an OCAML-written Algol W compiler using the interpreted 
OCAML implementation, and it still compiles Algol W to C faster than 
the C compiler translates its output code to machine code. 

-- hendrik