Windows-native GHC

[Simon Marlow]

Peter Tanski wrote:
> On Nov 15, 2006, at 11:45 AM, Simon Marlow wrote:
> 
>> Bulat Ziganshin wrote:
>>
>>> Wednesday, November 15, 2006, 12:19:29 PM, you wrote:
>>>
>>>> The reason for this was that I was assuming porting the mangler  to 
>>>> understand
>>>> MASM syntax would be a huge effort.  However, if we can use YASM  or 
>>>> something
>>>> else with GAS syntax, it might be feasible.  Still, going NCG- only 
>>>> is the
>>>> preferred solution, and it's the direction we want to move in.
>>>
>>>
>>> well, while C compilers generate better code - please try to support
>>> them. in this particular case, -fvia-C will make accessible both MS
>>> and Intel compilers, and the latter is the best C compiler at the
>>> moment
>>
>>
>> It'll need a *lot* of work in the mangler (that horrible Perl  script) 
>> to support mangling the output from the MS/Intel  compilers.  And it's 
>> not even worth the effort unless you put some  work into the back-end 
>> to generate C code that can be optimised  better by a C compiler.
> 
> 
> The reason to keep -fvia-C would be the same reason it is still here:  a 
> fair amount of the optimisation is passed to GCC--not just in the  area 
> of loop unrolling.

In fact, on the code generated by GHC, GCC's optimisations are mostly 
ineffectual.  In order to make better use of GCC's optimisations we would have 
to make changes in the backend to generate more gcc-friendly code, and I'm not 
at all convinced that's a good long-term strategy.

Cheers,
	Simon