September 14, 2003 Intermediate code | ||||
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Is this feasible? If we want to build portable code, we should have a set of cross-platform libraries to run us one’s over. I think this set must be under somebody control, and must change under some unique version system. In the other way, there will be a lot of libraries just using the cross platform ones, in some way “portables”. But object code format is unique for each platform, so, we have to lose the wonderful feature of D about using type information encoded in a library. The classic solution has been intermediate code. Some people instinctively associates intermediate code to .NET or Java, but in fact it is used in many other compilers (C++ compilers, not to forget the old P-code in earlier Pascal impl, and I guess any present time decent compiler does) as a step in translation to native code. We might then just delay this process until the final software is about to be installed in its target platform. By the way, then we can encode in that binary some class of signature proving component authenticity. Not to forget that perhaps, attending to its productivity, D could be of some interest to commercial world. Of course, this requires a standard, and sometimes this is hard to achieve in the open community. |
September 14, 2003 Re: Intermediate code | ||||
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Posted in reply to Alcides | Alcides wrote: > Is this feasible? Yes. It's much easier than bind D to GCC or write yet another back-end. > Of course, this requires a standard, and sometimes this is hard to achieve in > the open community. There are. Look at http://www.tendra.org/ Also, C can be considered as a kind of intermediate code. You can even embed some conditional compilation to adapt to different platforms. However, these all are for executable code. Type information (for import and so on) is quite a different thing and is probably eliminated to a significant extent within D front-end. -eye |
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