Squeakers -
There was a recent thread on gnu.misc.discuss: "Looking for an 'assembler generator' utility" that lead to these links. Perhaps Squeak might be able to leverage this work for native code generation (and to make Squeak independent of C).
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~nr/toolkit/ "The New Jersey Machine-Code Toolkit helps programmers write applications that process machine code---assemblers, disassemblers, code generators, tracers, profilers, and debuggers. The toolkit lets programmers encode and decode machine instructions symbolically. Encoding and decoding are automated based on compact specifications. The toolkit is a joint project of Mary Fernández and Norman Ramsey." This work is in ML, but why not Squeak?
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~nr/toolkit/examples/xs/xs.html A simple example of The New Jersey Machine-Code Toolkit in action
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/zephyr/ "Zephyr: Tools for a National Compiler Infrastructure" Squeak seems like a great platform to host (incremental) compilers.
I'm not sure what the licensing terms are for these works.
http://research.microsoft.com/Users/simonpj/c--.html "The trouble is that C was designed as a programming language not as a compiler target language, and is not very suitable for the latter purpose. The obvious thing to do is to define a language that is designed as a portable target language. "
http://www.fsf.org/software/gcc/gcc.html And of course, there is always the GCC technology base.
-Paul Fernhout Kurtz-Fernhout Software ========================================================= Developers of custom software and educational simulations Creators of the GPL Garden with Insight(TM) garden simulator http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com