A few updates.

Not much has been put up on this blog lately but work is still going on under the hood. The most significant changes in the pipeline are proper tail-calls and a copying garbage collector.

As it stands now, LHC uses the C stack extensively but this is obviously not ideal as it makes garbage collection, exceptions and tail-calls nigh impossible to implement. Since the ideal solution of using a third party target language isn't available (neither LLVM or C-- supports arbitrary object models), I've decided to slowly inch closer to a native code generator for LHC. It is fortunate that I find Joao Dias' dissertation nearly as interesting as the GRIN paper.

The first step would be to make the stack layout explicit in the GRIN code. This is necessary but not sufficient for tail-calls (some register coalescing is also required. More on this later). More importantly, accurate garbage collection now becomes a possibility. The way I want to implement garbage collection (and exceptions for that matter) is through alternative return points. This is one of three methods discussed in a C-- paper by Norman Ramsey and Simon Peyton Jones for implementing exceptions. I believe this method is versatile enough for garbage collection as well.

The concept revolves around using specialized code at each call site that knows enough about the stack layout to mark root pointers and to jump to the next stack frame. I will describe the details in another blog post. An interesting point is that the garbage collectors could be written in user-code instead of in the RTS.

So, to recap: Accurate garbage collection is just around the corner and proper tail-calls will follow in its heels. These two missing features are the reason that so many of the benchmarks fail to run for LHC.