Re:Lisp Hackers: Vladimir Sedach
by ScottBurson on Tuesday March 05, 2013 @07:27PM
(#5328491)
Wow, yeah, I'm glad I failed to talk him out of it!
Still, looking at his list of "big things that need to be done" -- this is not yet a general-purpose C compiler.
I should have asked what his goals for the project were. If he wants a compiler that handles all of C and produces code good enough that people would actually want to use it -- say, within a factor of 5 of optimized GCC output -- I think it's still clear that that's a huge project. But if he just wants to port hardware drivers, which appears to be his primary purpose, yeah, I can see that that might not be so hard. Driver code tends not to use the whole language, though it can do some weird low-level stuff like pointer type punning that can be hard to model in CL. And performance is probably not critical for most drivers since they do little computation.
Still, looking at his list of "big things that need to be done" -- this is not yet a general-purpose C compiler.
I should have asked what his goals for the project were. If he wants a compiler that handles all of C and produces code good enough that people would actually want to use it -- say, within a factor of 5 of optimized GCC output -- I think it's still clear that that's a huge project. But if he just wants to port hardware drivers, which appears to be his primary purpose, yeah, I can see that that might not be so hard. Driver code tends not to use the whole language, though it can do some weird low-level stuff like pointer type punning that can be hard to model in CL. And performance is probably not critical for most drivers since they do little computation.