[MIT-Scheme-devel] MIT Scheme on the AMD x86-64

[Taylor R Campbell]

I have just pushed a native compiler back end for the AMD x86-64
architecture.  This represents only about a week and a half of work,
so it may still be full of bugs, and it presently lacks open-coded
floating-point primitives, but it works well enough to recursively
build itself for five or so iterations and to run Edwin.

If you'd like to try it out, and if you have Git handy, the easiest
way is to boostrap it with the C back end.  Start by installing the
portable C distribution (the 20090107 snapshot will do), or at least
arranging its `mit-scheme-c' executable and library directory to be in
your environment variables PATH and MITSCHEME_LIBRARY_PATH; then run

   git clone git://git.savannah.gnu.org/mit-scheme.git
   cd mit-scheme/src
   sh make-native.sh

On an Intel Xeon CPU that is about a year old (I have no idea what its
clock speed is; Linux's /proc/cpuinfo claims both 1.6 GHz and 2.7
GHz), this took me a bit over fifteen minutes.  The `make-native.sh'
script takes the usual configure script's arguments, so you can pass
`--prefix=...' to set the installation prefix and whatnot if you want.
Afterward, you can test it by running

   ./microcode/scheme --library lib

or you can install it as usual with `make install'.