I was kind of hoping you would be in #pypy sometime in the last couple of days to talk about this. "Fabrizio Milo aka misto" <mistobaan@gmail.com> writes:

Hi to everyone,

I am really interested in code machine generation for risc processors. In order to have an idea of the work that can be done, and to create a proposal I will ask some questions:

- What is already done? where is it? (paths, file names please)

Well, the code generation code is all in pypy.jit.codegen; pypy.jit.codegen.model is a good starting place. There is a somewhat complete x86 backend and a less complete PowerPC backend (although I'm working on that right now and it will maybe have caught up by the end of the week, in terms of functionality at least).

- What ideas are already defined and need just to be implemented?

Well, the interface in the model file just referenced is more or less defined, although there are a few details that it would be good to change to make decent register allocation possible.

- Material that I have to / should read?

I have a rough background on RISC assembler, the most comes from MIPS and IBM's PowerPC

some material I am aware of is http://tinyurl.com/9dw43

Also worth reading are IBM's "Compiler Writer's Guide" and Apple's "LowLevelABI.pdf": http://www-306.ibm.com/chips/techlib/techlib.nsf/techdocs/852569B20050FF7785... http://gemma.apple.com/documentation/developertools/Conceptual/LowLevelABI/L... For a Summer of PyPy project there needs to be some reasonably clearly defined goals. An obvious and useful target is improving the quality of the generated PowerPC code -- I'm making it work at the moment, I'm certainly not making it fast. Another good thing would be sharing some code between the PPC and x86 code generation (not so much the actual code generation, but there are things about memory management of code buffers and so on that are likely to be similar between any machine code backend). And once this is done, adding another backend for say MIPS should be reasonably straightforward. Cheers, mwh -- Those who have deviant punctuation desires should take care of their own perverted needs. -- Erik Naggum, comp.lang.lisp