The following message is a courtesy copy of an article that has been posted to gmane.lisp.guile.devel as well.
On Sat, Dec 03 2016, Mikael Djurfeldt wrote: > Are there fundamental reasons for not re-using the gcc backends for > native code generation? I'm thinking of the (im?)possibility to > convert the cps to some of the intermediate languages of gcc. Tail calls come to mind. GCC is built around the C/C++ ABI and C calling conventions. Due to C's varargs, that's almost always some variant of "caller pops arguments". I think sibling calls can be optimized everywhere but not general tail calls. You could add support for tail calls to some backends, but that's far from "for free". The C calling convention is also not that great for returning a (statically) unknown number of values. Sure, there are tricks/kludges to compile Scheme to C. I think it would be simpler/less risky to make a C generating backend for Guile before going directly to GCC. The main advantage of a direct GCC front-end would be better control over debugging information. Helmut
