4 ms·

I've always found this sort of "I'm going to make my own" approche as being the best for innovation. I really hope this goes through and continues development.

mpu 11y ago
Thank you for your words. It is often called NIH, but eh, I learned a lot! And I think that I made some modest improvements over LLVM, you can check them out in my comparison at http://c9x.me/compile/doc/llvm.html http://c9x.me/compile/doc/llvm.html
- tinco 11y ago
  Looks good! I know your target is 70% of the performance, but is there any fundamental reason to QBE that it couldn't be more? Suppose I ported my compiler from LLVM to QBE (I think I could do so with not too much effort) would at some point I be able to work on porting some of LLVMs optimizing phases to QBE to get my performance up to par, or is there a design decision you made that will get in the way of the last 30%?
  - mpu 11y ago
    It's only a goal I set to myself, if we can do better, heck let's do it! Keeping the code short, on the other hand, is really something I care about.
    - tinco 11y ago
      Great, I have the same goal for my compiler. I'd love for the compiler to be able to bootstrap its own backend, and as it only compiles C that would rule out llvm. I am not sure how far I am along in actually compiling C, if I'd had to guess I'd say around 60%. Hopefully there's not too much crazy things on the horizon. I'm not a C programmer myself so I first implemented the switch statement in a naieve way, and then I discovered the way they actually work and spent days getting it right. If I get to the point where I can compile trivial C programs like the benchmarks game, I'll research a move to QBE :)
    - gravypod 11y ago
      If you modularize/abstract different optimization passes, you could easily keep code clarity high, while still having a very clean set of code. I've not done this a lot in C but it looks possible: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/384121/creating-a-module-system-dynamic-loading-in-c http://stackoverflow.com/questions/384121/creating-a-module-...

mpu 11y ago

Thank you for your words. It is often called NIH, but eh, I learned a lot! And I think that I made some modest improvements over LLVM, you can check them out in my comparison at http://c9x.me/compile/doc/llvm.html http://c9x.me/compile/doc/llvm.html

tinco 11y ago
Looks good! I know your target is 70% of the performance, but is there any fundamental reason to QBE that it couldn't be more? Suppose I ported my compiler from LLVM to QBE (I think I could do so with not too much effort) would at some point I be able to work on porting some of LLVMs optimizing phases to QBE to get my performance up to par, or is there a design decision you made that will get in the way of the last 30%?
- mpu 11y ago
  It's only a goal I set to myself, if we can do better, heck let's do it! Keeping the code short, on the other hand, is really something I care about.
  - tinco 11y ago
    Great, I have the same goal for my compiler. I'd love for the compiler to be able to bootstrap its own backend, and as it only compiles C that would rule out llvm. I am not sure how far I am along in actually compiling C, if I'd had to guess I'd say around 60%. Hopefully there's not too much crazy things on the horizon. I'm not a C programmer myself so I first implemented the switch statement in a naieve way, and then I discovered the way they actually work and spent days getting it right. If I get to the point where I can compile trivial C programs like the benchmarks game, I'll research a move to QBE :)
  - gravypod 11y ago
    If you modularize/abstract different optimization passes, you could easily keep code clarity high, while still having a very clean set of code. I've not done this a lot in C but it looks possible: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/384121/creating-a-module-system-dynamic-loading-in-c http://stackoverflow.com/questions/384121/creating-a-module-...