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Cross-platform idiomatic code generation

Some languages cross-compile. Things like Xtend and Shen generate source code, whereas things like Bigloo and Fantom target bytecode. For some reason I day dream about tools to translate a Nice Language into Regular Day Job Languages while somehow maintaining an idiomatic source-level code style in each of those.

Model driven design tools talk about it sometimes: Practical Model-to-Code Transformation in Four Object-Oriented Languages. Admittedly that's constraining things a bit since they are all OO, and not e.g. 1 OO, 1 FP, 1 Logic target.

This paper describes a practical framework that generates idiomatic code in four different object- oriented languages, Java, C++, Eiffel and C#, starting from an intermediate model expressed as an XML parse tree. Effort was directed towards ensuring that the generated systems executed with identical semantics.

By raould at 2014-08-01 22:01 | LtU Forum | previous forum topic | next forum topic | other blogs | 3929 reads

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I finally read this paper

It is interesting, but it is not about anything I recognize as modeling. The XML format used to generate Java, C#, C++, or Eiffel code is itself code: it has the same fine granularity as any other programming language. So what we have here is a programming language, not particularly easy to read or write, and a compiler for it with four back ends.

By johnwcowan at Fri, 2014-08-08 18:11 | login or register to post comments