No Assembly Required: Compiling Standard ML to C

No Assembly Required: Compiling Standard ML to C (1990)

by David Tarditi , Peter Lee , Anurag Acharya

Venue:	ACM Letters on Programming Languages and Systems
Citations:	50 - 1 self

Datum	Value	Source
TITLE	No Assembly Required: Compiling Standard ML to C	SVM HeaderParse 0.1
AUTHOR NAME	David Tarditi	SVM HeaderParse 0.1
AUTHOR ADDR	Pittsburgh PA 15213	SVM HeaderParse 0.1
AUTHOR NAME	Peter Lee	SVM HeaderParse 0.1
AUTHOR ADDR	Pittsburgh PA 15213	SVM HeaderParse 0.1
AUTHOR NAME	Anurag Acharya	SVM HeaderParse 0.1
AUTHOR ADDR	Pittsburgh PA 15213	SVM HeaderParse 0.1
ABSTRACT	C has been used as a portable target language for implementing languages like Standard ML and Scheme. Previous efforts at compiling these languages to C have produced efficient code, but also compromised on portability and proper tail-recursion. We show how to compile Standard ML to C without making such compromises. The compilation technique is based on converting Standard ML to a continuation-passing style-calculus intermediate language, and then compiling the continuationpassing style-calculus to C. The generated code achieves an execution speed that is about a factor of two slower than a native code compiler. The generated code is highly portable, yet still supports advanced features like garbage-collection and first-class continuations. We analyze aspects of the compilation method that lead to the observed slowdown, and suggest changes to C compilers that would better support the compilation method.	SVM HeaderParse 0.1
CITATIONS	20 found	ParsCit 1.0