Re: Generating JIT compilers

> It Seems That This Approach Is The Common One. For Reasons Of
> Speed Or Ease Of Implementation? The Quality Of The Emitted Code
> Doesn'T Compare To The Outcome Of A "Real" JIT Compiler, Does
> It?


Probably both. A tool like GNU lightning is still template based, but
at a level that resembles assembly more than bytecode, say. Templates
are simply sequences of invocations of preprocessor macros that
assemble opcodes into memory: but, these macros can of course be
parameterized and this allows one to do limited register allocation
and customization of the templates, and produce better code.


There is nothing that distinguishes a "real" JIT from a "real"
compiler. A "real" compiler can be fast and produce bad code (like
tcc) and a JIT can produce excellent code slowly using expensive
compiler techniques like SSA or dominator analysis.


> that is kind of what our Yirr-Ma framework does. the emitted target
> machine code can be generated very fast, yet the quality is by far
> not optimal.


> In General I Am Interested In The Question Of "What Can Be Generated
> From Specs, Without Writing Source/Target Machine Dependent Code" (Of
> Course The Specs Must Be Written :-))


Try GNU lightning, it looks to me like what you are looking for. I
don't understand exactly what you mean by specs though.


Paolo

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