[pypy-dev] Re: Fwd: michele.simionato at gmail.com: ACCU conference aftermath

[Michael Hudson]

Armin Rigo <arigo at tunes.org> writes:

> Hi all,
>
> I took the liberty to forward here the following e-mail from Michele 
> Simionato, as it contains interesting links.

I think Michele is using a different definition of "JIT" to me...

> As I told you in the conference, I think you should check in the
> Lisp/Scheme world where there is an astonishingly amount of
> knowledge about JIT and in general about compiling to C code fast.

While not disputing the general thrust of this, I would say that I am
aware of *no* work on using run-time information to improve
compilation in a Lisp or a Scheme system (this surprises me, and I
have looked for it a bit, but I may have missed something).

Also, very few serious common lisp implementations go via C (the only
one I can think of that does is GCL).

Armed Bear Common Lisp is essentially Jython for CL (it compiles to
bytecodes, not Java).

> Relevant projects I know of are:
>
> - SBCL, a JIT compiler for Common Lisp;

SBCL is not a JIT compiler in the sense I understand the words.

> - Bigloo, a high performance Scheme->C compiler;
> - Chicken, another easy Scheme->C compiler.

I don't know much about bigloo.  Chicken is surely interesting, but I
don't know how much type inference it does.  I think it has a cute GC
implementation (the "cheney on the mta" trick).

> All these projects are free software and they are actually working products,
> not just experimental stuff. SBCL is mostly developed in the US
> I think (it is the successor to the Carnegie Mellon Common Lisp),

Actually I think most current work is done by Dan Barlow, Christophe
Rhodes (who both live in London) and Alexey Dejneka (who is Russian),
althought the project lead William Newman is indeed American.

> Bigloo is developed in France by Manuel Serrano whereas Chicken is
> developed in Germany by Felix Winkelman. I am an user of Chicken and
> I think Felix is a extremely nice and helpful guy.

I remember him that way from way back when I used to read
comp.lang.scheme.

Cheers,
mwh

-- 
  Hey, if I thought I was wrong, I'd change my mind.  :)
                                    -- Grant Edwards, comp.lang.python