Comment by cbsmith
13 years ago
Yeah, which is why traditionally a LOT of languages, particularly early in their careers, have compiled down to C. Really aside from JVM targeted languages, it still tends to be the trend.
So it is pretty weird for that to be highlighted as the big distinctive feature.
> Yeah, which is why traditionally a LOT of languages, particularly early in their careers, have compiled down to C. Really aside from JVM targeted languages, it still tends to be the trend.
What about .net/mono targeted languages, javasvcript targeted languages? And custom interpreters jit(frequently but not always written in c)
CLR targeted languages are few and far between, as are JavaScript targeted languages, so I didn't consider them a big enough factor to impact the "trend".
People focused on entirely new languages tend not to target JITs first for the same reason they tend to not target direct machine code first: it just adds complexity to getting a proof of concept out the door. LLVM, the JVM, and yes, the CLR are starting to change this, but aside from the JVM, there are still only a handful of languages going that route.
LLVM has C backend, though it is not fully supported. It seems like it would.be helpful for bootstrapping LLVM for a new architecture and for A/B testing of other backends' performance and correctness.