Excerpts from Karel Gardas's message of Thu Apr 07 13:14:46 -0400 2011:
OK! Thanks for the information. So this -fnew-codegen is this famous codegen which is using hoopl for data-dependency tracking or something like that if I understand correctly
Yep.
And which is producing just C-- in order to be compatible with the current infrastructure, i.e. NCG?
Not quite. We have two C-- representations, in cmm/CmmNode.hs and cmm/OldCmm.hs respectively. Our backends consume OldCmm, and Hoopl consumes CmmNode, and then converts it to OldCmm using CmmCvt.hs.
If I also read correctly somewhere on GHC Trac Wiki, then this -fnew-codegen should sometime in the future even replace NCG. May I ask you when such replace is planed?
That's the idea, but depends on how long it takes for us to get the new code generator generating as good (or better--that's the idea behind Hoopl) as the old code generator at a reasonable pace. The new codegen is already several years into the making.
I'm asking since I'm still poking with the idea of writing NCG for some GHC not yet supported platform and since this will be my free time hobby project it'll certainly take some time hence I do have doubts if to use current NCG as a basis for it or wait and/or use your new planned infrastructure.
It's certainly a question. Since we can convert from one to another, whichever one you pick, we should be able to support (some fiddling may be required if you use the new C-- representation, since none of our other backends use it right now--but this is certainly the way forward.) Edward