On Sat, 20 Mar 2010, John Meacham wrote:
Unboxed values directly translate to values in the target language, an unboxed Int will translate directly into an 'int' as an argument and an unboxed pointer will be a raw pointer. Unboxed values have no special interpretation and are _not_ followed by the garbage collector. If the target language does not support a feature such as multiple return values, it will have to be simulated. It would not be wrong to think of Grin code that only deals with unboxed values to be isomorphic to C-- or C augmented with multiple return values.
Thank you for the insights! Everyone is doing LLVM today, so why not JHC? :-) LLVM supports garbage collection, multiple return values, low-level optimizations. It might be more appropriate as compiler back-end than C, however certainly less portable. Only a thought of me.