Arunkumar S Jadhav
As I understand it, nhc98 generates byte-code out of a program that is interpreted by mutator.
Yes.
I've developed a native code generator (for i386) that takes as input G-code which is described in SPJ's book. Now I would like to do the same for G-code produced by nhc98. I would like to know.
1) Has any one tried this (nhc G-code to native code generation) ? If yes then it would be great if we can share some of the ideas.
About 8-9 years ago, David Wakeling wrote a native code-generator for nhc13. The performance of the resulting code was not a big improvement on byte-code interpretation - about a 2x speedup. He speculated that the basic G-code was not a good starting place, and that an STG machine intermediate language would probably lead to better code generation, with more room for further optimisations.
2) Is it possible to generate native code fully *just* by looking at G-code and symbol table generated by nhc98 ?
Almost. In addition, the generated code must co-operate with the runtime system (e.g. GC). The code generator needs to know such things as: the layout patterns of values in memory; where the constant-table for a function is stored; and so on. If you do develop an i386 code-generator for nhc98, do please make it available, either as a separate distribution, or by feeding patches back to us to incorporate into the main CVS repository. Regards, Malcolm