C-- specfication

[Arash Rouhani]

(Sorry Florian, I forgot to "reply to list"!)

Hi Florian!

Forget Cminusminus.org, in my experience it seems to have diverged from 
the GHC version of Cminusminus.

I would recommend these resources

 1. See the top of
    https://github.com/ghc/ghc/blob/master/compiler/cmm/CmmParse.y
 2. Be ready to occasionally look into
    https://github.com/ghc/ghc/blob/master/includes/Cmm.h
 3. Edward Yang's blog post is a must-read
    http://blog.ezyang.com/2013/07/no-grammar-no-problem/ (less than a
    year old)
 4. You can also get the big picture of Cmm from David Terei's bachelor
    thesis:
    https://davidterei.com/downloads/papers/terei:2009:honours_thesis.pdf
 5. 2 years ago, Simon Marlow extended the classical Cmm syntax to make
    it much nicer:
    https://github.com/ghc/ghc/commit/a7c0387d20c1c9994d1100b14fbb8fb4e28a259e
 6. The commentary (it is kinda outdated in my experience, but worth
    taking a look :)),
    https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Commentary/Rts/Cmm *and*
    https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Commentary/Compiler/CmmType
 7. Read the code! There's a lot of Cmm files and after looking at
    various parts of it for a while parts start to make sense :)
 8. Shameless plug: You might find sections 4.2 and 4.2.1 from my master
    thesis helpful to understand the difference between arguments and
    fields. http://arashrouhani.com/papers/master-thesis.pdf

And it will take time to learn Cmm. The most unintuitive thing for me 
that took me a while to understand is that there are no function calls 
in "classical" cmm code. The newer syntax allows function calls but you 
should know that they are kind of magical. Hope this helps! :)

(Sorry for giving so many reading references :p)

Cheers,
Arash


On 2014-05-03 12:05, Florian Weimer wrote:
> I'm looking for a specification of C--.  I can't find it on the
> cminuscminus.org web site, and it's also not included in the release
> tarball.  Does anybody know where to get it?
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> ghc-devs mailing list
> ghc-devs at haskell.org
> http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/ghc-devs

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