There was a couple of PhD theses at ETH Zurich in the 90s on optimizations for Oberon, as well as SSA support. I haven't looked at your language yet, but depending on how advanced your compiler is, and how similar to Oberon, they might be worth looking up.

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Rochus 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I'm only aware of Brandis’s thesis who did optimizations on a subset of Oberon for the PPC architecture. There was also a JIT compiler, but not particularly optimized. OP2 was the prevalent compiler and continued to be extended and used for AOS, and it wasn't optimizing. To really assess whether a given language can achieve higher performance than other languages due to its special design features, we should actually implement it on the same optimizing infrastructure as the other languages (e.g. LLVM) so that both implementations have the same chance to get out the maximum possible benefit. Otherwise there are always alternative explanations for performance differences.

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vidarh 31 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

It might have been Brandis' thesis I was primarily thinking about. Of the PhD theses at EHTz on Oberon, I'm also a big fan of Michael Franz' thesis on Semantic Dictionary Encoding, but that only touched on optimization potential as a sidenote. I'm certain there was at least one other paper on optimization, but it might not have been a PhD thesis...

I get the motivation for wanting to use LLVM, but personally I don't like it (and have the luxury of ignoring it since I only do compilers as a hobby...) and prefer to aim for self-hosting whenever I work on a language. But LLVM is of course a perfectly fine choice if your goal doesn't include self-hosting - you get a lot for free.

	▲	Rochus 20 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I don’t like LLVM either, because its size and complexity are simply spiraling out of control, and especially because I consider the IR to be a total design failure. If I use LLVM at all, it would be version 4.0.1 or 3.4 at most. But it is the standard, especially if you want to run tests related to the question the fellow asked above. The alternative would be to build a frontend for GCC, but that is no less complex or time-consuming (and ultimately, you’re still dependent on binutils). However, C on LLVM or GCC should probably be considered the “upper bound” when it comes to how well a program can be optimized, and thus the benchmark for any performance measurement.

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girvo 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Is anyone attempting to implement Oberon on LLVM IR? Sounds like a fun project

	▲	Rochus an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Threre are at least two projects I'm aware of, but I don't think they are ready yet to make serious measurements or to make optimal use of LLVM (just too big and complex for most people).