[bitc-dev] BitC is interesting

[Jonathan S. Shapiro]

On Fri, Nov 14, 2008 at 3:11 PM, Donnie Jones <donnie at darthik.com> wrote:

>
>> Pragmatically, though, I have two concerns with LLVM that I don't know how
>> to address:
>>
>>    1. It's written in an unsafe language, and therefore is very difficult
>>    to include in a BitC runtime.
>>    2. It is starting to look like we need our own optimization
>>    infrastructure in order to efficiently avoid JIT compilation.
>>
>> Neither of these is insurmountable, and we may find solutions to both as
>> we dig into LLVM more seriously.
>>
>
> Maybe C-- (C minus minus) can provide the flexibility you need?
>

Unlikely, and C-- is by far the weaker infrastructure.

>    One thing that clang does really well is proper error messages.  This
>>> is also, to me, one of the main attractive properties of python (although
>>> the errors are at runtime).  g++, on the other hand, has completely
>>> incomprehensible error messages if you make a mistake with anything that
>>> uses templates.  In my opinion, it would be a good move to make error
>>> messages a focus early on.
>>
>>
>> BitC actually does a very good job with some kinds of error messages that
>> are well known to be hard, and we are pretty good at identifying locations
>> of errors precisely. The messages themselves could certainly use
>> improvement, and we need to do some work on error recovery in the parser.
>> None of that is as important as getting a first working compiler into the
>> field.
>>
>
> I am also glad to hear that BitC will do a very good job with error
> messages.
>

Probably not at first, but we *will* pay attention to that.

shap
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