Re: [q-lang-users] Pure

[Albert G. <Dr....@t-...>]

Hi Libor,

> I think maybe static strong typing is too high a price to pay for efficiency :)

Yes. And you can always do the really heavy number crunching stuff in
Fortran and call those functions from Pure. Pure doesn't support
alternative calling conventions in its extern declarations yet (only C),
but I think that LLVM already does at least Fortran and Ada, so support
for that should be trivial to add in Pure.

> The speed is good and will definitely make Pure a practical language.

Yes, I think so, too. And it's just the first version of the compiler,
I'm pretty sure that it can still be improved. Once you've all got Pure
up and running, many eyes will be able to look at the generated code
(yes, you can do that; the interpreter's interactive 'list -d' command
disassembles the LLVM IR code of a Pure function) and I hope that we can
then identify places where we can still bum a few instructions. And I
didn't even employ LLVM's inter-procedure optimization passes yet, and
inlining some critical runtime calls should also give another speed boost.

> I just tried to compile the latest SVN release, plus bootstrap compile
> the latest front-end (llvm-gcc 4.2) but failed miserably with a 
> "can not build table" error, after hours of compilation.

Um, bad luck there. :( LLVM 2.2 compiled cleanly for me, out of the box
(on both SUSE 10.1 and 10.3, that is). AFAIR the build process *is* a
bit involved, though, maybe some kind soul here could write a brief
summary of the necessary steps that I could put in the Pure README file
or on the website?

Albert

-- 
Dr. Albert Gr"af
Dept. of Music-Informatics, University of Mainz, Germany
Email:  Dr....@t-..., ag...@mu...
WWW:    http://www.musikinformatik.uni-mainz.de/ag