Well, I think that the compiler could be shared between a native code and bytecode machine.
I think the frontend (parsing the language into a tree structure) can certainly be shared, i'm not sure about the further back stages. Bytecode environments are certainly very different from native code in the sense that you can't just treat variables as variable sized lumps of bytes.
- One should not attempt to implement Java or C# language constructs in Pascal.
I think to produce a viable compiler you have to. Bytecode environments don't let you access memory directly so you don't have much choice but to use the class/interface structure provided by the bytecode environment. Furthermore all the standard libraries for the language rely on them as an interface so not being interoperable with them would be a huge pain. Lukilly other than the garbage collection issue delphi style object pascal and java/.net actually have pretty similar object models so it shouldn't be too hard to map them. _______________________________________________ fpc-devel maillist - fpc-devel@lists.freepascal.org http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-devel
