ghc sparc NCG

[Simon Marlow]

Duncan Coutts wrote:

> At the moment -fvia-C is produces somewhat faster code than -fasm on all
> arches. Though the difference varies between arches, I've heard that
> -fsam is very nearly on par with -fvia-C on x86-64.

On x86, -fasm is slower for floating point, but probably about the same 
for integer code.  On x86_64, -fasm is about the same as -fvia-C.  On 
powerpc, I believe -fasm is better than -fvia-C.

Partly this is because we don't give gcc much room to maneuver.  See 
this wiki page for our long term plan:

   http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/BackEndNotes

Basically we want to beef up the NCG and deprecate -fvia-C.

Cheers,
	Simon