ILJc: Porting Microsoft.NET IL (Intermediate Language) to Java

Abstract

ILJc (intermediate language to Java compiler) would map IL (intermediate language) of the Microsoft.NET framework to Java based applications. ILJc would be the middle-base in compiling and translating the IL code which ports out of Microsoft Visual Studio.NET into the equivalent Java byte code. Thus, ILJc would simply transform Visual Studio.NET into relative Java applications. ILJc does its best to map Microsoft.NET entities to Java equivalents, furthermore ILJc must deal with the exceptions too. For an instance, in the case of exceptions, Java provides one exception class, but Microsoft.NET provides three; ILJc is forced to map all three Microsoft.NET exceptions to the single Java exception. The task is no easy to fix, but simply have to write around this many-to-one mapping. Although all Microsoft.NET exceptions are derived from the system.exception class, not all Java exceptions are derived from Java.lang.exceptions; some generated by the JVM (Java virtual machine) are derived from the Java.lang.error class. This incongruence shows up in Microsoft.NET code that tries to catch all exceptions, when translated into Java, exceptions derived from Java.lang.error is taken for granted and slip off. As a proof of concept of how that system could be, we started sometime ago to implement ILJc, featuring a modular, flexible architecture. In this paper we show its structure, how it can be used, and how it can be further extended