Using GCC for "real-time" compilation in audio engine development

[Fergus Henderson]

I know of two uses of GCC for "real-time" compilation.  One is in the
Mercury debugger's support for interactive code execution, which works by
generating a Mercury file, compiling it to C, compiling that to a shared
library, dynamically linking it in to the executable being debugged, and
executing it.  We get about a 2-second response time on a 1.2GHz Athlon.
This is a bit slow -- for interactive use, we'd like the reponse time
to be less than 0.3 seconds -- but it's tolerable.

The other is "ghci", the interactive version of the Glasgow Haskell
compiler, which uses a similar technique.

-- 
Fergus Henderson <fjh@cs.mu.oz.au>  |  "I have always known that the pursuit
The University of Melbourne         |  of excellence is a lethal habit"
WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh>  |     -- the last words of T. S. Garp.