Re: anyone interested in decompilation

Jürgen Kahrs wrote:


> Chris Dollin wrote:
>
>> [It's handy to use `reference` to mean `pointer without arithmetic
>> opportunities`, but then C++ uses it for something else, not
>> unrelated, again ...]
>
> The Java type "reference" misses not only pointer arithmetic but also
> type casting (of pointers) and the address operator (&). You may of
> course argue that such features are not desirable.


I don't wish to come over as a nit-picker ... [1], but Java /does/
have type-casting of pointers. What it doesn't have is casting
pointers into or out of non-pointers. The need for &address is
much diminished because it would only be useful for primitive
types (since any non-primitive is already accessed via pointers).


Whether or not those features might be /desirable/, I don't know;
I haven't missed pointer arithmetic in Java in general, although
I'd dearly love it at the character-sequence level for lexical
analysis, and would personally rather have multiple-valued expressions
than address-of; both of those features make it, I think, rather harder
to have type-safe implementations, and weren't such implementations
a goal of Java? If I remember correctly -- and it's been a long time --
.NET only allows address arithmetic in unmanaged (hence unsafe) code.


> The absence of
> such feature makes it much harder to write compilers for a translation
> from ISO C to JVM.


Well, yes. This surprises me no more than it being hard to ride
a bicycle on water. The JVM wasn't designed as a general-purpose
implementation environment.


(In fact it /doesn't/ make it harder to write such compilers; it
  just makes it harder to write compilers that generate efficient
  code. Of course one hopes that C code will be efficient ...)


> The CLR environment of .NET is different in this
> respect. And most other virtual machines treat the concept of a
> pointer as a natural ingredient of a virtual machine.


Probably. I'd like to see the statistics, mind; they'd be
interesting.


[1] Although I probably am one.


--
Chris "seeker" Dollin
"People are part of the design. It's dangerous to forget that." /Star Cops/

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