Clean on FreeBSD using Linux ELF?

[William Wanders]

> William Wanders wrote:
> 
> > There were some plans to make a JavaVM architecture backend support.
> > But the JavaVM architecture is quite different from any real
> > architectures and a straithforward transformation of ABC (actually
> > the rewrite rules from which the ABC code is generated) into JavaVM
> > proved to be quite inefficient (read slow).
> >
> 
> Could you elaborate a little on this?  Were any of these
> findings written up?
Yes, but not for public use. It was merely an experiment during
a FP-course at the K.U.N. to gather information on subject of
translating Clean into Java or JavaVM.

The basic idea was to represent the graph rewriting strategy as
used in the by clean geneerated ABC code directly into Java and
JavaVM. The result was a fairly complete object oriented
implementation of the ABC architecture in a combination of Java
and JavaVM. Eg. nodes were represented in a general java class
called Node. Types and functions were extensions on the general
class.

Due to the large number of class types needed for even a small
program (1 class per type and function) made it unusable for
production use. The overhead neaded by the JavaVM was simply to
great.  A real emulator for the ABC architure and language might
even have performed better.

William Wanders