3 ms·

TCG is actually the 2nd generation backend. The 1st generation was much worse, but it was incredibly elegant: the operations were just written as functions in C

TCG is actually the 2nd generation backend. The 1st generation was much worse, but it was incredibly elegant: the operations were just written as functions in C, as you may do for an interpreter - and then memcpy’d one after the other. So a compiler from one architecture to another which is as easy to write as an interpreter (but without interpreter overhead), is independent of the target architecture - and it just works. I remember being blown away by the elegance.

CodesInChaos 6y ago
You might want to take a look at Partial evaluation, which is a similarly elegant technique. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partial_evaluation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partial_evaluation https://labs.oracle.com/pls/apex/f?p=LABS:0::APPLICATION_PROCESS%3DGETDOC_INLINE:::DOC_ID:1014 https://labs.oracle.com/pls/apex/f?p=LABS:0::APPLICATION_PRO...