Eric Rannaud wrote:
> On Sun, 2008-11-16 at 00:44 +0100, Florian Weimer wrote:
>> Given the Ada/GNAT experience, I don't think representation
>> requirements at the language level are a good thing. There are just
>> too many ambiguities, and it's rather difficult to fit these
>> requirements on existing backends (but GNAT managed to do it even for
>> the JVM).
>>
>> If you write your own backend, this may not be an issue. But it will
>> make porting to anything else very difficult.
>>
>> IMHO, a library-based solution which combines address arithmetic with
>> bare-metal loads and stores is more desirable. But you'd need some
>> form of compile-time meta-programming to ensure safety while
>> preserving succinctness.
>
> I believe this discussion around VMs has overlooked what I believe is
> one primary design objective for BitC: a language capable of direct
> hardware access, and capable of running on bare-metal. A language for
> kernels and embedded platforms. I believe there is nothing in the
> current language preventing a BitC program to be compiled to run in a
> freestanding environment, for instance (and that would have been on
> purpose).
The question is, do representation requirements needed to be supported
for all types, or only for a less expressive subset of types [*]?
I think that question is open, and BitC is an interesting experiment
into the first of those approaches. However, it's not the approach I
would take.
[*] for instance, monomorphic with no type classes and with additional
restrictions on which types may be used in unions.
--
David-Sarah Hopwood
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