Psyco Specializing Compiler

[Armin Rigo]

Hi Skip,

On Wed, 10 Oct 2001, Skip Montanaro wrote:
> were looking at using GNU's Lightning package to generate code.  It appears
> you are directly generating raw Intel machine code at this point.

Yes, right. No more licensing problems. I finally decided that writing raw
machine code would not be too much of a hassle. I made experiments with
generating code that itself generates code... To do this kind of thing you
really need to know the machine encodings; I had to write a formal
description in a Python file of the most common Intel instructions (the
next releases will include this kind of stuff).

I am currently reorganizing the source to more closely match the
description given in the doc, keeping the actual code-producing macros
completely separate from the rest, to facilitate porting to other
processors. I am also considering enhancing the formal instruction
descriptions enough to let a Python script write the C macros
automatically from it; porting would then be a matter of formally
describing the encodings only. 


Armin