[Info-vax] Future comparison of optimized VSI x86 compilers vs Linux compilers

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2020-08-03 21:25:22 +0000, onewingedshark at gmail.com said:

> On Monday, August 3, 2020 at 2:07:44 PM UTC-6, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
>> 
>> Learning more about the topic?  For x86-64 and Arm and some other> 
>> platforms, LLVM is a good starting point for writing a compiler, too.
>> 
>> https://github.com/banach-space/llvm-tutor
>> https://github.com/ghaiklor/llvm-kaleidoscope
>> etc...
> I'm not really interested in learning LLVM, even though I am working on 
> a compiler; the simple reason being that I'm not exactly interested in 
> investing in something only to get software-churned into 'deprecated' 
> in a year's time. [My compiler is Ada-in-Ada, SPARK where possible. The 
> ideal goal being a provable compiler, which should be useful in 
> certification.]

Which is a very different and far more constrained app target than the 
requirements and expectations that the VSI folks are necessarily 
contending with.  Expand your self-hosting Ada compiler project out to 
BASIC, Bliss, C, C++, Macro32, COBOL, Pascal, Fortran, and to tooling 
including LSEDIT and other IDEs, bespoke linker and debugger and object 
and executable analysis tooling and librarian and Oracle CDD/Repository 
support, and the rest of the baggage including the common language 
environment and hybrid/segmented addressing, and none of which needs to 
be provable past the applicable test suites, and then make the object 
and executable code compile and work across Intel and AMD subsets and 
maybe then with an Arm subset or two, and ponder the effects of those 
decisions and calculations and the scale of the project on your current 
approach.

And compiling to C or assembler or Bliss or whatever else gets ugly for 
the end-user developers.

I'd still have a look at LLVM. Even if you should discount the whole 
project, there are ideas to be had.


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