Re: guile-vm 0.3

[Keisuke Nishida]

At 09 Apr 2001 21:52:33 -0500,
Rob Browning wrote:
> 
> > I'm not so much thinking about "Scheme -> VM -> native", more about
> > 
> >                                       -> native
> >     Scheme --> some low level stuff -|
> >                                       -> VM 
> 
> Sounds good, and we can have whatever annotations are needed in the
> "low-level stuff" in order to do appropriate optimizations.  One thing
> I'd wondered about was whether or not we might want the "low level
> stuff" here to actually be a byte code (though perhaps not the VM one)
> or some other arch-independant disk writable format.
> 
> If we could have a post-compilation (i.e. after the really expensive
> analysis) representation that was arch-independent, but could be
> cheaply converted to VM input or assembly (via lightning) at load
> time, we could have both speed and portability.  This format might
> have to have more information that just VM byte codes, though, for the
> reasons mentioned above...
> 
> Dunno, but maybe worth thinking about.

This is exactly what I'm thinking of now.  I call the "low level stuff"
GLIL, which currently looks like this:

  (@asm (0 0 0 0)
    (const 1)
    (const 2)
    (add)
    (return))

Certainly, we can change the format and add more information.
What kind of information should be included?  I just can't
decide what is the best intermediate representation right now.

Keisuke