[Haskell-cafe] Re: Compiler backend question

[Achim Schneider]

Peter Verswyvelen <bf3 at telenet.be> wrote:

> Another question regarding the backend: a cool feature of the
> Microsoft Visual C++ (MVC) compiler is its ability to perform "LTCG" 
> (link-time-code-generation), performing whole program optimization.
> It something like this possible with Haskell / (or the GCC backend?).
> Would it be possible to feed all the generated C code of the GHC
> compiler into the MVC compiler, to generate one big MVC / LTCG
> generated executable? It would be interesting to see how much the
> whole program optimization approach (which can do analysis on the
> program as if it was a single module) would improve performance...
> 
jhc does that. Or rather, it doesn't compile Haskell modules separately
but throws them together (presumably) in the first pass.

Regarding C, it's actually only a high-level assembly language, with
compiler optimisations only optimising heavily if you use those
idioms... say inlining, loop-unrolling. If your compiler backend outputs
something that is already close to some generalisation of different
assembly languages, containing no superfluous code and compile-time
evaluable expressions and looking generally like a mess of mov's and
jmp's, nothing much more than optimisating register allocation and
pipeline usage optimisation can be done, which are both highly
processor-specific bastards, and likely to be hard to write better than
<insert favourite c-compiler>.

I figure it's being lazy in the right way(TM)

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