4. The future of GNU lightning

Presented below is the set of tasks that I feel need to be performed to make GNU lightning a more fully functional, viable system. They are presented in no particular order. I would very much welcome any volunteers who would like to help with the implementation of one or more of these tasks. Please write to me, Paolo Bonzini, at mailto:bonzini@sc{gnu.org, , bonzini@sc{gnu}.org} if you are interested in adding your efforts to the GNU lightning project.

Tasks:

• The most important task to make GNU lightning more widely usable is to retarget it. Although currently supported architectures (x86, SPARC, PowerPC) are certainly some of the most widely used, GNU lightning could be ported to others--namely, the Alpha and MIPS architectures.

• Another interesting task is to allow the instruction stream to grow dynamically. This is a problem because not all architectures allow to write position independent code.(8)

• Optimize leaf procedures on the SPARC. This involves using the output registers (%oX) instead of the local registers (%lX) when writing leaf procedures; the problem is, leaf procedures also receive parameters in the output registers, so they would be overwritten by write accesses to general-purpose registers.