🚀 go-pugleaf

>Okay, Simon Johnston just pointed me to Intermetrics efforts on an Ada 95
>to Java bytecode compiler, so I probably should elaborate on my previous
>posting:
>
>First, note that I said "readily be done".
>
>One could actually implement Oberon's semantics on the Java virtual
>machine, but the performance characteristics would be horrendous.
>
[snip]
>
>The list goes on. Procedure types need to be classes and hence any
>procedure eligible for use as a procedure variable needs to be a class.
>Nested procedures will require the introduction of classes for their outer
>scopes.
>
>So, you could probably get Oberon to run on top of the Java virtual
>machine. The results, however, would not be pretty and probably would not
>well serve the Oberon community since it would make Oberon's performance
>characteristics look significantly worse than Java's.
>
>It could be that I've missed something, but without the ability to take
>addresses of data on the stack or within a heap block and without the
>notion of procedure pointers, this list of problems looks pretty imposing
>to me.
>
>Mark

I think the point you missed is that the Java Virtual machine is really
at the level of the instruction set of a microprocessor.
Compiling to the Java VM is really like compiling to machine code:
a processor has in general no notion of objects, records and so on...
The compiler has to implement that.

Porting to the Java VM would be just like porting to a new microprocessor
(maybe a little easier: there is a garbage collected heap).

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