Re: [Tinycc-devel] Porting TCC to RTLinux

[Basile STARYNKEVITCH]

Le Wed, Nov 22, 2006 at 11:59:26PM -0500, Calin A. Culianu écrivait/wrote:
> 
> Wow Basile.  Your advice is really helpful and thoughtful.  You even 
> provided references!!  Thanks!!
> 
> 
> My thoughts, and please do correct me if you think my thinking is faulty:
> 
> C-- or the other langauges/systems designed for code generation would be 
> ideal but alas the code actually needs to be as human-friendly as possible 
> (certain expression and functions in this generated turing machine are 
> specified by human programmers and C-- seems a bit *too* low-level).
> 
> Actually even C is a bit too low-level, but it will do.  Ideally I would 
> want a higher level language like python or even GNU Octave (I know, it's 
> yucky -- but is ok at annotating mathematical expressions with is what we 
> really need).

For a kernel stuff, I tend to think that user interaction should be
done thru a helper application. Hence !i still believe that something
like lightning or libjit is the best approach. This helper application
could statically check the high-level code input by the user (so you
might write a type inference system for this) and translate it to
something else (a low level representation) that the kernel would use
to generate machine code.

And BTX tinycc generate machine code which is not better than what
you'll get with lightning, and which could be worse that what you get
with libjit.

Kernel code have severe constraints - you mentioned the 4k stack . So
you probably should put entirely a full compiler in it. And as you
mentioned, C is already too low level for you.

-- 
Basile STARYNKEVITCH         http://starynkevitch.net/Basile/ 
email: basile<at>starynkevitch<dot>net mobile: +33 6 8501 2359 
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