Brent Fulgham writes:

...

I was curious if the Ciao Prolog team had ever considered building a native-mode compiler similar to the GNU Prolog compiler? This would seem to have some advantages in terms of executable size and speed.

Was this ruled out for any technical reasons?

Yes, of course it has all the advantages you mention. It is not that it has been "ruled out"; rather, it is "not yet implemented". Historically, we started with an implementation based on a bytecode interpreter, and we have been using it so far. But a compiler based on translation to C is on the works, although it is not finished yet (it is not even in alpha state).

As Daniel Diaz, the main GNU Prolog's implementor, can say, a native compiler is a non-trivial task, and maintaining different back-ends for different architectures (say, i386, SPARC, MIPS, Power PC...) easily becomes a lot of work. That is one of the reasons why we chose to translate to C.

MCL

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