[plt-scheme] Languages and Tools

From: Adam Wick (awick at cs.utah.edu)
Date: Sat May 7 13:01:22 EDT 2005

Just as a datapoint, I find it a rare compilation task that requires 
more
speed than mzscheme gives me. At the moment, I'm writing a compiler of 
sorts
for C and C++. MzScheme handles all my rewriting tasks with (what I 
would
consider) reasonable performance. The only place where I wish I had a 
bit
more speed was in parsing. If I were doing register allocation, that 
might
also be somewhere I'd want more speed.

Still, as Matthias pointed out, most decent compilers for functional 
languages
will give you that extra speed you want. Chez if you want to stick with 
Scheme,
OCaml if a ML dialect fits your problem better.

C (or C++) strike me as phenomenally stupid languages to write a 
compiler in,
but that's never stopped anyone before.


-Adam

On May 6, 2005, at 12:44 PM, Matt Jadud wrote:

>  For list-related administrative tasks:
>  http://list.cs.brown.edu/mailman/listinfo/plt-scheme
>
> It was too large.
>
> Perhaps the question is moot anyway; the people I'd be talking to 
> think things should be written in C "because it'll be fast." So, in 
> the end, I probably couldn't win an argument about how to 
> design/implement compilers with them--no matter how much ammunition or 
> ideas I walked away from this list with.
>
> M
>
> Matthias Felleisen wrote:
>> On May 6, 2005, at 1:54 PM, Matt Jadud wrote:
>>> Question:
>>> If you were writing a compiler today, what tools would you use?
>> The question is too large. W/o constraints, the answer is obviously 
>> use a language in which it is trivial to process trees (the most 
>> common form of program representation) and verify whatever aspect of 
>> tree processing you find critical for your application.



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