MELT

MELT does indeed need resources. The big bottleneck is not directly MELT
[the translation from MELT to C is quite quick - the entire MELT translator
is 35KLOC of MELT code which translates to nearly 600KLOC of generated C
code; the translation process of MELT is 20 seconds and uses a reasonable
amount of RAM, less than 300Mb), it is the compilation time of the C code
generated by MELT (and since MELT is written in MELT, you need to compile
the generated C code of the MELT translator; that may take more than an
hour if you compile that code with -O2).

MELT data (in particular closures and objects) is initialized by
straighforward but large C code, there is no serialization or reading of
data files for that. So the initialization routine of each MELT module is a
huge sequential C routine (typically 50KLOC) which essentially fills a big
struct-ure (of thousands of fields). And the compilation of that particular
big routine is stressing the GCC compiler (in particular when optimized
with -O2).

However, I made very recently some significant progress on that issue. The
biggest generated C code file was about 6Mbytes a few weeks ago, but is now
only 3Mbytes, notably because I did split its original MELT version in two
files. So if you tried MELT a month ago, you could try again!

I am also working on an alternative, non-lispy, syntax to MELT. I hope that
an infix syntax might attract more people to MELT.

Feel free to ask me more questions about MELT, perhaps on the
gcc@gcc.gnu.org mailing list (with MELT in the subject line) or directly by
email to me.

Regards.

PS. I will probably release MELT [as a gcc 4.5 plugin] as soon as gcc 4.5
is released. But you can get MELT using subversion with
svn co svn://gcc.gnu.org/svn/gcc/branches/melt-branch GCC-MELT
as a GCC branch, or you could get a 4.5 snapshot and a few files from the
MELT branch & compile it as a gcc-4.5 plugin

--
Basile Starynkevitch (the GCC MELT guy).