[LLVMdev] Thinking about "whacky" backends

[Samuel Crow]

----- Original Message -----
> From: Nate Fries <nfries88 at yahoo.com>
> To: Samuel Crow <samuraileumas at yahoo.com>; LLVM Developers Mailing List <llvmdev at cs.uiuc.edu>
> Cc: 
> Sent: Friday, June 3, 2011 6:52 PM
> Subject: Re: [LLVMdev] Thinking about "whacky" backends
> 
> Most JVMs perform terribly. Even Sun's has had notable performance issues in 
> my experience.
> .NET is an excellent case, but then that's only available on Microsoft 
> systems and from numerous benchmarks I've found, Mono is a weak substitute. 
> If you're suggesting that we go the other way around (build native code from 
> a high-level language, as opposed to using native code initially) then 
> that's a terrible idea for myself personally. I lack familiarity with 
> CLR-based languages and absolutely detest some things about Java; I would rather 
> stick with good ol' C++. I prefer strongly-typed languages, so ECMAScript 
> and most other standardized high-level languages are less than desirable for me.
> 
> I would much prefer my original suggestion, which is very simple as well and 
> would require even less code than the conversions you're suggesting (and the 
> only additional dependency being an archiving library).
>

I'm not terribly fond of .NET or Java either.  When I was thinking of a friendlier language, I was thinking more along the lines of http://code.google.com/p/tart/ which is already an LLVM language and designed to take advantage of all of LLVM's features internally, such as using opaque types to implement templates and eliminating the preprocessor altogether.