[fpc-devel] Forwarded message about FPC status

[Florian Klaempfl]

Am 25.12.2012 19:30, schrieb Dimitri Smits:
> I'm guessing that is NOT on a Windows platform? Every full build (it
> has been a while) I've ever done of the compiler on windows was at
> least a few minutes.

It is windows: "self compilation". No rtl building or whatever.

>
>> The only approach I see to speed it up is to kick the whole back
>> end and generate directly some close to i386 intermediate code
>> directly in the parser.
>
> lovely, but isn't that what Embarcadero is doing for their future
> compiler?

No. It is exactly the counterpart. llvm intermediate language is for 
sure as much as possible platform independent and not "close to i386" as 
I wrote. If one wants to accelarate FPC by one magnitude one cannot 
fiddle with some abstract intermediate layer but output already from the 
parser something as close as possible to i386 machine code, do register 
allocations and optimizations on it and write the machine code to disk.

> Using the llvm toolchain, they will provide a front
> compiler to an intermediate "language" or interpreted code. Then they
> have a few optimisations for the middle layer and use the back-ends
> that are already available to make stuff architecturally compile to
> whatever back-end (ARM v?, intel x86, powerpc, motorola 68k, jvm,
> dalvik, .net il, compiled php, ... or any community or custom
> backend)

... and this costs time. And it is similiar to FPC's approach.