[MLton-devel] porting to PowerPC

[Stephen Weeks]

> There is significant interest here in porting MLton to
> the PowerPC.  There's currently ongoing work on
> VM design and interoperability taking place on 
> PowerPC platforms (mostly in Java right now), but MLton
> has been advocated as an alternative research vehicle
> in this space.

Cool.  Could you explain a little more how MLton fits in here?  Is the
idea to build tools with MLton, to target MLton to a new VM, to make
it interoperable with Java, or just to make MLton run on PowerPC?

> Do you have a guess on how difficult such a port might be?  

I guess about 2-4 weeks of work (for me), using the C codegen.

> Would using the sparc port as a reference implementation be
> reasonable?

There's not too much in general to learn from the Sparc port.  It's
mostly a bunch of little bug fixes to handle the various OS
differences between the systems, checking out the libraries,
profiling, ...  Plus the major fix to handle alignment.

The PowerPC should be similar.

> Would you think this would be a suitable project for a motivated
> undergraduate, or are there enough subtle issues in the backend that
> it would require a more sophisticated grad. student to handle?

For someone coming from the outside trying to do this project, the
main difficulty is not in the port, it's in becoming familiar enough
with MLton.  If someone is motivated and comfortable enough with SML,
compilers, runtime systems, C programming, etc. they should be fine.

> Motorola is also interested in funding work in PowerPC development
> at Purdue in general.

Cool.  Since my last project with PolySpace is wrapping up, I am
looking around for projects.  I would be interested to talk with you
or your Motorola contact to see if there's anything I could do.  I'd
be happy to work on (or help supervise) a C or native codegen.

The port also gets more difficult if we want to use 64 bit pointers.
That would require more changes to the runtime and some changes deeper
in the compiler internals.  Ditto for 64 bit ints.


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