Re: compiling to jvm

Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo wrote:
>
> Does anyone have experience compiling languages other than Java to JVM?
> Is there a web page listing all known compilers?
> Thanks for any info.
> --


I think I can say some words as a C compiler for the JVM was the subject
of my recently written graduate thesis.


First of all, the JVM is an emulator of a low level environment. But it
is quite different than the existing hardware microprocessor systems.
Besides the standard sets of instructions and registers, it offers
support for managing objects, arrays, method invocations, global and
local variables and some basic data types (mainly those that appear in
Java).


But there are also some limitations like that there is no direct access
to the addresses of variables nor to the references to objects. This
feature makes a fully functional implementation of C pointers rather an
impossible task...


Telling it shortly, compilers of some languages can be better
implemented for the JVM than some other ones. Among successful
implementations there are compilers of Prolog, Lisp, Logo and Basic.


A list of existing compilers and interpreters for the JVM can be found
at: http://grunge.cs.tu-berlin.de/~tolk/vmlanguages.html


Some other useful addresses:


the JVM specification:
http://java.sun.com/docs/books/vmspec/index.html


Jasmin assembler for the JVM (GNU license):
http://www.mrl.nyu.edu/meyer/jvm/


Java Bytecode assembler:
http://siesta.cs.wustl.edu/~djh4/


JavaCC - lexical/syntactic LL(k) analyzer generator:
http://www.suntest.com/JavaCC/




I hope it will help.


Greetings,
Janusz Szpilewski
--

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