I'm still meddling with different ways to exploit LLVM's awesome JIT
compilation capabilities from OCaml. Although I've managed to get minimal
compilers up and running with relatively little effort, I can't help but
think that I'm spending a significant amount of time reinventing the C
front-end.
Would it make sense to have higher-level OCaml bindings to the current CLang
front-end to make code generation even easier?
Does CLang use a suitable intermediate representation for this to be possible?
Just an idea...
The higher level IR that clang uses is basically a C AST. This interface is under constant flux though. If you wanted to do this, it would be very reasonable to just cons up some C code and send it through the clang parser. Clang works great in a JIT environment.
-Chris
Great! Sounds like CIL should do the trick:
http://manju.cs.berkeley.edu/cil/
CIL should provide the AST type already in OCaml with a pretty printer to
generate C code as a string that can be fed straight into CLang for JIT
compilation. Then all I need is bindings to actually invoke CLang from OCaml
with a string containing the source code.
I'm particularly interested in making FFI to existing C libraries as easy as
possible using code compiled by my compiler. I can't think of a better way
than explicitly using C as an intermediate language.
Thanks,