Re: librep's indirect threaded bytecode interpretter

[Thomas Francis Burdick <tfb at u dot washington dot edu>]

On 24 May 2000, Michael Livshin wrote:

> as everybody knows, among the flagship GNU products there are the GNU
> Compiler Collection and the GNU Binutils.
> 
> was there ever any research done aimed at making these things suitable
> for an interactive native-compiling language environment?  it seems
> such a shame that so much backend and porting work is done for all
> those icky batch languages like C, C++, Java, Chill, Pascal, etc,
> while all the Lisp, Scheme, Prolog & ML systems out there are
> basically out in the cold when it comes to native compilation.

Having looked through CMU Common Lisp and GCC, I feel safe in saying that
it should be possible to port the CMUCL compiler to the GCC back-end, and
to make its runtime environment into a library.  And in a couple
years -- when I'm out of school -- I might even try it.  As it is now,
CMUCL compiles everything into native code, but doesn't have the number of
targets that GCC does.  And of course, my point is that if it can be done
for CL, there's no reason it can't be done for scheme.  It would be a
rather large undertaking, tho.