TLDR; do you know of any general purpose languages that can also compile a function to some representation of AND/OR gates (or NAND gates, or whatever)?
Edit: actually any algebra/formal-logical system is also fine (not just boolean algebra).
Yes, a A LOT of additional info is needed, like defining how input/output is defined, and I am interested in how those would be specified. I’m not interested in printing an actual circuit, just the boolean-logic level. And I’m mostly asking because I feel like most compilers can’t generate a clean/mathematical representation from their AST. There’s AST to IR, there’s hard-coded optimizations on the IR, and then there’s hard-coded mappings from the IR to assembly, but at no point (AFAIK) is the code turned into a algebraic/logical system where something like De Morgan’s Law can be applied. And that seems really sad to me.
So you could say my real question is: what compilers have a strong logical/algebraic internal representation of their own AST?
Maybe something like Haskell or Prolog do this. The Wolfram Language almost certainly does but it’s closed source.
I don’t know about math reduction not being the bottle neck. If I was custom optimizing hot code then yeah, cache hit optimization is huge, but I’m thinking of generic optimizations on hot code that only the compiler looks at. Beyond out-of-order-execution and SIMD kind of algebraic shuffling. For example, I want to be confident that the compiler would transform something like
for each in range(x) x += x
into
x*=x+1And based on stuff like this (which is shockingly recent IMO) I don’t think modern compilers can even find that shortcut right now. Which is kinda sad when you think about it.
If x=65536, any non-algebraic optimizaiton would be vastly inferior. And sure an experienced dev wouldn’t make this kind of mistake, but I bet half the code running on the average computer wasnt written by experienced devs. And its not like its an either-or situation, we can do both optimization steps.