Neil Mitchell wrote:
GCC is optimised for dealing with code that comes from C, and the back end language is much like C. GCC is also not really set up to be used by bolting different front ends on to different back ends - part of this is a license issue - if the front and back ends were well split and available separately you could write a commerical backend onto a GPL front end.
Well, I don't know about the licensing, but according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Compiler_Collection#Front_ends, a new cleaner intermediate language was created in 2005 for GCC, which might be more "general"?
You would get much better improvements on whole program at the Haskell level. By the time you get to the generated C you have obfustcated all the structure of the program, and are unlikely to benefit that much.
Yes that would be great! Or even at JIT time ;-) But, given the time GHC takes to optimize a single module, I guess it would not really be practical to let those optimization take place on the full program? It would take ages no? I just wanted to see if it is *possible* to feed just all the C code from GHC into a C compiler, and then generate a single executable from that C code (including the GHC runtime). For example, for the XBOX DEVKIT, Microsoft shipped LTCG versions for all the core libraries, which gave a nice performance improvement for free (if I'm not mistaking, this gives 10% to 15% faster code). Actually this LTCG thingy was first supported by the Intel compiler I believe. Thanks, Peter