FCG - A CODE GENERATOR FOR LAZY FUNCTIONAL LANGUAGES

The FCG code generator produces portable code that supports efficient two-space copying garbage collection. The code generator transforms the output of the FAST compiler front end into an abstract machine code. This code explicitly uses a call stack, which is accessible to the garbage collector. In contrast to other functional language compilers that generate assembly directly, FCG uses the C compiler for code generation, providing high-quality code optimisations and portability. To make full use of the C compiler's capabilities, FCG includes an optimisation scheme that transforms the naively generated stack-based code into a register-based equivalent form. The results for a benchmark of functional programs show that code generated by FCG performs well in comparison with the LML compiler.