Re: [Tinycc-devel] inline assembly and optimization passes

[Sylvain BERTRAND]

On Sat, Sep 21, 2013 at 12:02:58AM -0500, Jared Maddox wrote:
> I recently bought a copy of the "Dragon Book", and according to
> it, optimization passes are usually performed on an AST that is
> created from a compiler-specific intermediate code: in essence, a
> specialized byte code or assembly code that the compiler outputs
> instead of directly producing the intended end-product byte code.
> It shouldn't be too hard to just add an IC / IL target and let
> someone do optimization as a completely different program
> (probably in a custom linker-and-optimizer program). I myself
> have considered adding support for a VM that could partially
> support this sort of thing.
> 
> If he wants to volunteer to implement such an IC / IL target
> (particularly if he also volunteers to provide the assembler with
> the ability to understand it), then I say it would be worth
> considering any patches that he provided. Certainly though, most
> optimizations shouldn't be allowed in TCC itself.

Since tinycc should stay C (untill the ISO standard gets really
bad), we could drop a few levels of generalization: A backend
which does not generate assembly/machine code, but a backend
which does generate "kind of optimized" C code.  We would feed
again that "kind of optimized" C code to tinycc with the cpp
disabled.  It seems to me a well balanced trade-off, but I may
miss obvious blockers.

-- 
Sylvain