From: David Kastrup <dak@...>
Date: 2006-11-19T19:15:09+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby vs Java vs c++

"Martin DeMello" <martindemello@gmail.com> writes:

> On 11/19/06, El Gato <wmwilson01@gmail.com> wrote:
>> However, it seems to me that you're looking for the expressiveness of
>> Ruby and the speed of C++.  Welcome to the club.  Strangely enough,
>
> I'm learning OCaml for just that reason :) Some of the Scheme
> dialects get some impressive performance figures too, but I haven't
> really looked into them as much.

I have looked through several compilers.  I have to say that one of
the most appealing Scheme->C compiler ideas I have seen was to drop
the distinction between heap and compiler stack: functions were called
with an appropriate continuation data structure, and no function ever
properly returned at the C level.  Data was allocated using alloca.

When the heap/stack combination overflowed, it was garbage-compacted
in its entirety.  All continuations without a pending reference to
them consequently were removed from the stack.

This basically made continuations rather easy to implement.
Impressive.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum