Porting legacy interpretive bytecode to the CLR

ABSTRACT

We describe and evaluate five different approaches to executing legacy BCPL programs on the Common Language Runtime. The approaches cover the entire spectrum of machine-independent compilation, from high-level source code to low-level bytecode. We discuss the trade-offs involved with each approach.

REFERENCES

• 1: Cristina Cifuentes , Mike Van Emmerik , Norman Ramsey, The Design of a Resourceable and Retargetable Binary Translator, Proceedings of the Sixth Working Conference on Reverse Engineering, p.280, October 06-08, 1999
• 2: Erik Meijer and John Gough. Technical Overview of the Commmon Language Runtime, 2001. http://research.microsoft.com/~emeijer/Papers/CLR.pdf.
• 3: Martin Richards. A Machine and Language Independent Benchmark Test. http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/mr/Bench.html.
• 4: M. Richards , C. Whitby-Strevens, BCPL: The Language and its Compiler, Cambridge University Press, New York, NY, 1981
• 5: Martin Richards. The BCPL Cintcode System Users' Guide. University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, 2001. http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/mr/bcplman.pdf.
• 6: Jeremy Singer. A Decompiler, 2001. http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/jds31/decomp01.ps.gz.
• 7: Andrey A. Terekhov , Chris Verhoef, The Realities of Language Conversions, IEEE Software, v.17 n.6, p.111-124, November 2000 [doi>10.1109/52.895180]
• 8: Mario Wolczko. Benchmarking Java with the Richards Benchmark. http://research.sun.com/people/mario/java_benchmarking/richards/richards.html.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.3 PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
      D.3.4 Processors
          Subjects: Code generation

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.3 PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
      D.3.2 Language Classifications
          Subjects: Object-oriented languages
          Nouns: Java

General Terms:
Algorithms, Documentation, Theory