rtl at els

[Andy Wingo]

Hi!

Ludo and I had a fun time at the European Lisp Symposium last week,
meeting other lispers, schemers, and a rogue racketeer.  We also managed
to spend some time going through the pending patches, as you probably
saw, and I'll be landing them as I fix up docstrings ;)

We also talked about the way forward to target RTL from Scheme.  While
we both think that Noah's CPS work is the way to go, we're a little
concerned that to try to land the new VM and the new compiler at the
same time is too much uncertainty.  So as a stopgap, we're going to try
to compile Tree-IL directly to RTL.  We'll run a pass over the tree-il
that converts it to ANF, then adapt the existing tree-il->glil compiler
to target RTL.  I know that compiler pretty well so I should be able to
make some good progress there fairly quickly.

So that's the plan.  It will probably make the CPS work easier,
actually, as there will be example RTL code and we'll be sure the VM is
capable enough, and we don't have to also worry about the VM
switchover.  But we'll see :)

Cheers,

Andy
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