Delphi to bytecode compiler

[Jonathan Neve]

Hi all!

I'm wondering what would be involved in making a Delphi to bytecode
compiler... Does anyone have any experience writing compilers, that
could give me some advice?

The reason I think this would be useful, is that it would broaden the
scope of the Java platform, enabling many languages to be used (just
like .NET). There are already several langages (e.g. Java, Jython,
Groovy, and perhaps others), but it would be nice to have a language as
close as possible to Delphi syntax that could likewise compile into
bytecode. This would greatly facilitate converting projects from Delphi
to Java.

Any ideas?

Thanks!
Joanthan Neve.

 

[Chris Uppal]

I'm wondering what would be involved in making a Delphi to bytecode
compiler... Does anyone have any experience writing compilers, that
could give me some advice?

An ambitious project.

You might want to look for the book:

Programming for the Java Virtual Machine
Joshua Engel

which talks quite a lot about compiling non-Java to run on the JVM.

It might be that the book

Compiling for the .NET Common Language Runtime (CLR)
John Gough

would be even better in some ways. It largely focuses on running Component
Pascal on the CLR, and although the CRL is not the same as the JVM, there are
many similarities. The same implementation (gpcp) is also able to generate
Java bytecodes, so the author is JVM-aware and occasionally mentions JVM issues
in the book. The implementation is on the Web somewhere (you can Google for
"Component Pascal" and "gpcp" as easily as I) so you may be able to find
material about the JVM implementation if you look around a bit.

-- chris

 

[Andy]

Hi,
I wanted to do the same for my own language and wrote a library (still
working on it)
in C that allows to read/write Java bytecode
You can find out more at
http://sourceforge.net/projects/myfriend/
You could also check out the whole project
cvs -z3 -dserver:[email protected]:/cvsroot/myfriend co
myfriend/friend2java

 

[Kai Thomsen]

A couple of years ago Borland actually developed a prototype of a
Delphi->Java Bytecode compiler. But as far as I remember they never got
beyond console applications and considered the effort of translating VCL
code to Swing as too much. You could google the Borland newsgroups for
information about this project.

Kai