GCC talk proposal

[Andreas Bauer]

I want to renew my offer to give a talk about the work I'm doing on GCC at 
the moment.  My aim is to enhance the compilation process for functional 
and logic languages that use GNU C as target platform.  One of the major 
problems here is the huge amount of tail-calls (i.e. calls in tail 
position) occuring in functional programs and the question on how to 
efficiently translate them with the GNU C compiler.

Therefore I'm working on an alternative calling convention for GCC which 
supports proper tail-calls.  Having such an optimisation implemented, you 
could write tail-recursive programs without having any stack growth at all 
and no performance losses (except for the overhead of the new calling 
convention itself).

Clearly, this would be an advantage not only for those who are using GHC or 
Mercury at the moment.

So, if you're interested in some GCC internals, the concept of tail 
recursion and tail-calls, calling conventions and the like, please let me 
know.  I'd be very interested to meet up with people who have worked on 
similar projects before, or people who would be interested in using my GCC 
optimisations for their own projects.

Cheers,
Andi.