Thank-you for the information. It was very useful. Couple of reactions FWIW:
On 8/21/07, Stefan O'Rear
Sooo.... if I was feeling "evil", could I take this c-code and pipe it into something that turns it into C#???
Yes. You could do the same with the original haskell. It's called a compiler.
Yes, that is true. However, this is also true, for an appropriate compiler, for programs such as: "Give me the first 10 numbers of the Fibonnacci (spelling?) series". The compiler can search on the internet for what is the Fibonnacci series, and/or ask its friends. In a subsequent version, a compiler could in fact compile programs such as: "Go!" ... where the compiler uses context to deduce what I want it to do ;-) Nevertheless certain compilers are easier to write than others, and writing code to automatically port ghc-generated C code is likely to be significantly easier than to compile Haskell to C#, or to .Net bytecode, from scratch.
Name: Native code generator Performance: 0.97 Flags: -fasm
GHC's own mini C compiler converts the internal C-- data into assembly code, which is then piped to gas.
Ah, hence SPJ's C-- project?
Name: Unregisterized C Performance: 0.40 Flags: -unreg
Generates near-ANSI C, using memory variables for the VM's registers and the returning function pointer hack seen in oh so many Scheme compilers. Good for early stages of porting, and not much else.
Could be good enough. C# compiler and VM provides some optimizations which could handle this. What is the function pointer hack? Specifically, is that why you say "near-ANSI" C, rather than "ANSI C"?
If it contains lots of macros (or any macros at all perhaps...), this becomes non-trivial,
I fail to see how macros have anything to do with this. Especially since cpp removes them all.
but otherwise I think most things in C can be mapped fairly trivially to C#?
Unsafe C#, sure. Haskell's type system is strictly more expressive than C#, and you need to sacrifice either machine efficiency or checked safety.
(It's a one-way mapping of course, eg "delete" in C is simply dropped when mapped to c#).
There is no delete in C, and even if there was, GHC wouldn't use it. Allocation is *the* major bottleneck of functional programs, and having a custom allocator inlined into every call site is vital to have usable performance.
(Not that I have any good reason to do this, simply... fun).
Stefan
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