Re: Possible to write compiler to Java VM?

David Chase wrote:
> You bet. By-the-way, be careful not to confuse Java and the JVM. For
> all its complexity, the C++ template system just bangs out code as if
> from a stencil, and the front-end language (Java or whatever) could
> bang out code as if from a stencil, and generate the byte codes for
> each of the instances of the template. IT WOULD BE NICE if there were
> some sort of VM support for shared-byte-code templates, but when I
> thought about this, it got messy. If you (or anyone else) care, the
> approach that I find most interesting is what is described in some of
> the work on Theta by Liskov et al at MIT. See
> http://clef.lcs.mit.edu/, or their article (Day, Gruber, Liskov,
> Myers) in OOPLSA '95.


I agree that the Theta approach to templates is very interesting,
and it seems like it would be fairly straightforward to add similar
capabilities to Java. If you use Java interfaces to constrain the
parametric types, you would avoid some of the more complicated
things in Theta. I haven't had time to work out any of the details
of that, so I'm curious to know how it gets messy. Are there
security issues involved? Something else? One of these days I'll
have to sit down and work it out myself. In the meantime, I'd like
to learn from your experience.


--Bob (bwilson@shasta.stanford.edu)
--

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