2014-09-15 13:56 GMT+02:00 phil@highoctane.be <phil@highoctane.be>:

On Mon, Sep 15, 2014 at 1:28 PM, Thierry Goubier <thierry.goubier@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Phil,

thanks for the update on Slang to C. Allways significant to have that.

Two open questions:

- would a slang to x86 asm via NativeBoost be doable / a nice target?

I have to admit that I am happy to have Slang to C and it gets out of my competence from there :-)

Yes, I believe it is very cool as it is. You need a full C toolchain around to make it work.

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Now, Slang to asm, that's quite a chasm to cross. If what asm does is doing syscalls, well, I don't see the added value right away as NB Assembler would do that already no?

Hum, I would more like SSE and AVX code done this way: matrix multiplications, bitmap processing, heavily used code, SciSmalltalk stuff on very large datasets.

To see NB only used as a way to write syscalls :(:(:(

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Now, I am on Linux for about all of my Pharo code, so, C is nice enough.
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- would targetting LLVM-IR be of interest?

Oh, that would be interesting. In order to get the IR interpreter and running things all over. Now, this should be extended to the whole VM then. But not sure we want that before we get 64 bits...

OpenCL, SPIR code generation and link to Cog.

The ability to generate better code than when targetting C.

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Ah, I should have taken the research career :-)

Hum, you know that researchers are allways on the lookout for SMEs to collaborate on projects :-)

Thierry