Best Compiler Destination

Question

I\'ve got a few languages I\'ve been building as interpreters. When I\'m ready to take \"that next step\", what options are best for non-native compiled formats... what are

Answer 1

Code generation is my business :-)

Comments on a few options:

• CLR:

  • Pro: industrial support
  • Con: you have to buy into their type system pretty much completely; depending on what you want to do with types, this may not matter
  • Con: Only Windows platform is really prime-time quality

• LLVM:

  • Pro: enthusiastic user community with charismatic leader
  • Pro: serious backing from Apple
  • Pro: many interesting performance improvements
  • Con: somewhat complex interface
  • Con: history of holes in the engineering; as LLVM matures expect the holes in the engineering to be plugged by adding to the complexity of the interface

• C--

  • Pro: target is an actual written language, not an API; you can easily inspect, debug, and edit your C-- code
  • Pro: design is reasonably mature and reasonably clean
  • Pro: supports accurate garbage collection
  • Pro: most users report it is very easy to use
  • Con: very small development team
  • Con: as of early 2009, supports only three hardware platforms (x86, PPC, ARM)
  • Con: does not ship with a garbage collector
  • Con: project has no future

• C as target language

  • Pro: looks easy
  • Con: nearly impossible to get decent performance
  • Con: will drive you nuts in the long run; ask the long line of people who have tried to compile Haskell, ML, Modula-3, Scheme and more using this technique. At some point every one of these people gave up and built their own native code generator.

Summary: anything except C is a reasonable choice. For the best combination of flexibility, quality, and expected longevity, I'd probably recommend LLVM.

Full disclosure: I am affiliated with the C-- project.