Re: [Gnu-arch-users] arch roadmap 1 (and "what's tom up to")

[Zenaan Harkness]

On Sat, 2004-07-03 at 02:46, Tom Lord wrote:
>    It's folklore, among Schemer's, that closures, continuations and
>    tail calls amount to the same thing as (effectively) direct access
>    to a CPU's PC.  You can write code that generates, essentially, a
>    machine language "jump" instruction to an arbitrary target.  You
>    can more or less directly manipulate a CPU's frame pointer
>    register, without restriction.  Thus, whatever weird
>    flow-of-control you want, you can implement directly in Scheme.
>    Whatever weird scoping rules you want, you can map them onto
>    Scheme.
> 
>    In other words, Scheme is in some sense kind of an idealized
>    macro-assembler:  the full power of the underlying CPU is 
>    exposed.   You aren't locked into a fixed set of flow of control
>    concepts as you are in most languages.   You aren't restricted to a
>    tree-shaped dynamic call-trace.

So, when will we see an executable compiler that can produce the results
this folklore implies - ie. performance as good or better than C code?

Could said compiler be a front-end to gcc (I'm assuming the answer will
be no to this one)?

And finally :), when will we see a competitive sed implementation in
scheme?