JSC THE .

NET CROSS COMPILER FOR WEB PLATFORMS

Arvo Sulakatko, Technical University of Tallinn

Abstract The aim of this work is to research the benefits of translating .NET components to other languages and platforms. Such tool can be used to develop complex client-server systems while using all possible features from various different available components and platforms.

[...] Writing a client-server application is not one of the easiest tasks. It is actually believed to be one of the hard tasks. As we know different platforms support different programming languages and they usually have their own object oriented type system which includes a base type library. Could the compiler figure out and infer which parts of the project should be kept on the server and which parts sent to the client? The cross compiler JSC enables one to write the application in one of the .NET languages like Visual C# and at a post build step JSC will recompile it for other platforms like JavaScript. No C# source code is being parsed to achieve this. The .NET bytecode MSIL also known as Common Intermediate Language (CIL) is being analysed and used instead. Not every opcode is to be supported for all platforms as they might lack the required features. For example JavaScript and Java currently lack memory related operations. During the development of JSC it will be possible to add more support for more complex opcodes possibly via wrappers. Microsoft officially supports multiple languages for .NET Visual C#, Visual Basic .NET, Visual F# and Visual C++ all of which compile down to CIL.

REFERENCES [1] Project homepage [2] Research homepage [3] Open source homepage

http://www.jsc-solutions.net http://jsc.ee http://jsc.sf.net