Anyone worked directly with the Java Bytecode?

[tatteredpotato]

The final project for my compilers class has several predefined options, or we can chose our own. The one option is to retarget to LLVM (we're currently outputting x86 assembly) however it was mentioned that groups have retargeted to the JVM directly before. I think retargeting to JVM sounds awesome, however I don't want to commit to something too difficult that we can't finish in time. We would have about 3 weeks to finish this last project, so we would be fairly time-limited.

For reference we have the following features (and lack of features) in our language (designed as a simplified form of C):

• Integer arithmetic, integers are all 32 bits (no short/long/char etc)
• NO floating point operands/arithmetic
• If/for/while loops and conditionals (also ?: conditional expressions)
• Structs and Arrays. We allocate all structs and arrays on the heap, never on the stack.
• Function calls; can only return integers and pointers (register size-ed operands).

Any input would be appreciated, as well as any other suggestions for cool directions we could take this.

 

[degibson]

Sounds interesting. If you find any useful how-to-use-Java-bytecode sources, post them please. Sorry I cannot help directly.

Indirectly: One way to 'target' Java bytecode is to do source-to-source translation to Java, then compile that Java. Might be a good way to test your eventual solution.