No Assembly Required: Compiling Standard ML to C
David Tarditi, Peter Lee, and Anurag Acharya


C has been used as a portable target language for implementing
languages like Standard ML and Scheme.  Previous efforts at compiling
these languages to C have produced efficient code, but also
compromised on portability and proper tail-recursion.  We show how to
compile Standard ML to C without making such compromises.  The
compilation technique is based on converting Standard ML to a
continuation-passing style lambda-calculus intermediate language, and
then compiling the continuation-passing style lambda-calculus to C.
The generated code achieves an execution speed that is about a factor
of two slower than a native code compiler.  The generated code is
highly portable, yet still supports advanced features like
garbage-collection and first-class continuations.  We analyze aspects
of the compilation method that lead to the observed slowdown, and
suggest changes to C compilers that would better support the
compilation method.