3 It would be interesting to support the Java language as part
6 You have to think of Java as various pieces: Java the
7 language and Java the virtual machine.
9 It is possible to compile Java to .NET, as shown by the
10 Microsoft J# compiler. We could then allow the migration of
11 Java applications to the Mono runtime.
15 Although a native compiler can be built, and probably should be
16 built using an existing compiler, a short term solution is to
17 build a translator from Java class files to the ECMA CIL images.
19 This has the advantage that we can use an existing and tested
20 Java compiler to generate the code, and then we can use an automated
21 code compiler that compiles Java VM bytecodes to CIL bytecodes.
25 It would be interesting to write a semantic translator that
26 converts java byte codes into CIL opcodes. This is possible
27 because the Java byte codes are a subset of the CIL ones.
29 A semantic tree needs to be constructed (very much in the
30 spirit of what is done in mono_analize_stack in
31 <tt>mono/mono/jit/jit.c</tt>. Once such a semantic tree is
32 constructed, we could generate the equivalent Java code.
34 This has a number of interesting side effects: people can
35 continue to use their existing Java compilers to compile their
36 code, and a simple tool that converts their .class files into
37 a .NET assembly can be used.
41 We could translate the GNU Classpath libraries with the above
42 tools to provide the Java runtime required to host into the
43 Mono runtime. Some special treatment would be required for
44 core data types like integers, arrays and strings, and of
45 course reuse where possible existing classes from .NET to make
48 ** JILC - Java to IL Compiler
50 This is an attempt to make the java bytecode available for the
53 The project attempts to generate the IL code / bytecode from the
54 compiled java class files. It has reached the stage of code-generation.
55 The issues that needs to be addressed is the mapping of java objects
56 to the IL objects, eg: java.lang.String to System.String.
58 Gaurav Vaish and Abhaya Agarwal are currently leading this project.
59 The project is currently hosted at <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/jilc">SourceForge.Net</a>.
60 The official home page of the project is
61 <a href="http://jilc.sourceforge.net">http://jilc.sourceforge.net</a>.