From: Mark H Weaver Subject: Bootstrapping ML without an existing ML compiler Date: Sun, 05 Jul 2020 18:36:10 -0400 (4 weeks, 6 days, 2 hours ago) Envelope-to: bandali@gnu.org To: Brett Gilio , leo.prikler@student.tugraz.at, bandali@gnu.org Cc: bootstrappable@freelists.org X-detected-operating-system: by eggs.gnu.org: First seen = 2020/07/05 18:38:43 X-Spam_action: no action X-Spam_bar: - Message-ID: <87k0zhzj0q.fsf@netris.org> Hello Brett, Leo, Amin, and others, I wanted to give you a heads-up that I'm currently studying the details of ML semantics, in preparation to write a minimal ML compiler in portable Scheme that compiles ML to portable Scheme. I intend to keep the code as simple and straightforward as possible. It will *not* be competitive from an efficiency standpoint, nor will I expend much effort into producing comprehensible error messages. My purpose is *solely* to facilitate bootstrapping of popular ML compilers without relying on precompiled binaries of existing ML compilers. There's one crucial piece of information that I need to know: what non-standard extensions to ML 97 will I need to support in order to allow bootstrapping the popular ML compilers? More generally, for each ML compiler of interest, we should find out the following information: * What other existing ML compilers, if any, can be used to bootstrap it? * Which extensions to ML 97 would be needed to bootstrap it? With this information in hand, we should be able to determine the minimum set of ML compilers that must be bootstrapped directly using this new Scheme-based compiler, and therefore which extensions I will need to support. I would be grateful for any input you can provide on these questions. Warm regards, Mark