Peter Verswyvelen
Another question regarding the backend: a cool feature of the Microsoft Visual C++ (MVC) compiler is its ability to perform "LTCG" (link-time-code-generation), performing whole program optimization. It something like this possible with Haskell / (or the GCC backend?). Would it be possible to feed all the generated C code of the GHC compiler into the MVC compiler, to generate one big MVC / LTCG generated executable? It would be interesting to see how much the whole program optimization approach (which can do analysis on the program as if it was a single module) would improve performance...
jhc does that. Or rather, it doesn't compile Haskell modules separately but throws them together (presumably) in the first pass. Regarding C, it's actually only a high-level assembly language, with compiler optimisations only optimising heavily if you use those idioms... say inlining, loop-unrolling. If your compiler backend outputs something that is already close to some generalisation of different assembly languages, containing no superfluous code and compile-time evaluable expressions and looking generally like a mess of mov's and jmp's, nothing much more than optimisating register allocation and pipeline usage optimisation can be done, which are both highly processor-specific bastards, and likely to be hard to write better than <insert favourite c-compiler>. I figure it's being lazy in the right way(TM) -- (c) this sig last receiving data processing entity. Inspect headers for past copyright information. All rights reserved. Unauthorised copying, hiring, renting, public performance and/or broadcasting of this signature prohibited.