Re:Dialects of Lisp
by jrajav on Friday February 22, 2013 @12:50PM
(#5265498)
This answer references Chicken Scheme, which compiles to C - I'm curious, is there any work on a Scheme that compiles to LLVM? (A brief search didn't reveal anything that's been updated in the last 4-5 years.)
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Pretty much all the major Schemes predate LLVM, and modifying a compiler to use LLVM instead of its existing tools is not necessarily trivial and not necessarily worth it.
Gambit is getting backends that include x86 and JavaScript Real Soon Now. There has been LLVM work, but I don't think it progressed very far.
Re:Dialects of Lisp
by mark_l_watson on Friday February 22, 2013 @02:52PM
(#5266334)
+1 for mentioning Gambit-C. I don't use Gambit-C anymore, but I used to use it a fair amount for writing small utility programs. Gambit-C can be used to build very small and efficient executables. Gambit-C doesn't have the huge library that Racket or Chicken have but it is great for building small command line utilities, etc.
you can compile the c code to llvm IR, but why would you do that? LLVM is not a very good VM it's not platform agnostic, some stuff like the the pointer size are set a compile time, c seems to be a better platform agnostic assembler.