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International Conference on Principles and Practice of Declarative Programming

PPDP 1999: Principles and Practice of Declarative Programming pp 1–28Cite as

C-—: A Portable Assembly Language that Supports Garbage Collection

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 1702))

Abstract

For a compiler writer, generating good machine code for a variety of platforms is hard work. One might try to reuse a retargetable code generator, but code generators are complex and difficult to use, and they limit one’s choice of implementation language. One might try to use C as a portable assembly language, but C limits the compiler writer’s flexibility and the performance of the resulting code. The wide use of C, despite these drawbacks, argues for a portable assembly language. C-— is a new language designed expressly for this purpose. The use of a portable assembly language introduces new problems in the support of such high-level run-time services as garbage collection, exception handling, concurrency, profiling, and debugging. We address these problems by combining the C-— language with a C-— run-time interface. The combination is designed to allow the compiler writer a choice of source-language semantics and implementation techniques, while still providing good performance.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Microsoft Research Ltd,  

    Simon Peyton Jones

  2. University of Virginia,  

    Norman Ramsey

  3. University of Glasgow,  

    Fermin Reig

Authors
  1. Simon Peyton Jones
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  2. Norman Ramsey
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  3. Fermin Reig
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Digital Technology Center and Dept of CS, University of Minnesota,  

    Gopalan Nadathur

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© 1999 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Jones, S.P., Ramsey, N., Reig, F. (1999). C-—: A Portable Assembly Language that Supports Garbage Collection. In: Nadathur, G. (eds) Principles and Practice of Declarative Programming. PPDP 1999. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1702. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/10704567_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/10704567_1

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-66540-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-48164-5

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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