git, github, clang

I've imported my svn history into git, and published the whole thing on github:

https://github.com/samrushing/irken-compiler/

Still trying to grok git and github, there'll probably be a stall for a week or so.

In the meanwhile, I have interesting news:  I was able to take out all the 'nested functions' which relied on a gcc extension.  I resisted this for a long time because early testing had shown that declaring the 'registers' as local register variables in the main function was a huge win.

After a quick test the other day, I found that moving everything out to global variables has no visible impact on performance.  I don't know if this is because of improvements in gcc & llvm, or if I just wasn't trying a large enough program.

That means I'm now able to compile the output with clang, rather than relying on llvm+dragonegg, which can be much more annoying to build, install, and use.

The good news continues: although the performance of the generated code is identical (maybe a tiny bit faster), the compilation time has been cut quite significantly.  On my machine an LLVM -O2 compile dropped from 18m to 8m.  The -O0 compile time is even sweeter, about 3s, which is actually faster than Irken itself, which hovers right around 5s to self-compile.  So a roughly 10s edit-compile cycle will definitely speed the development of Irken up.

Now the bad news.  The no-nested-funs version causes 'as' on snow leopard to take a lunch break.  It actually nails the CPU for 10 or 15 minutes before finally emerging as if nothing was wrong.  No problems on FreeBSD 7.3 with gcc-4.5.3, though.  This could be a significant annoyance, since I expect many people trying out Irken would prefer to do so with a stock compiler.

More bad news:  clang-2.9 crashes when fed Irken's self-compiled output.  I was going to file a bug against it, but when I checked out the svn version and built it the problem was gone.  Sigh.

This is why I'm trying to figure out how to make branches on github, since it'd be nice to maintain both versions for a while until these issues are ironed out.  I have made a local branch called 'no-nested-funs', I just haven't figured out how to publish it on github.