Your subject and your message body seem to have two different questions. To answer the subject question, it is possible to convert CIL to a native executable...with some restrictions. Do a search for ``ngen.exe'' on google (which does the nearest equivalent on .NET) and ``ngen'' on the list archvies; Zoltan.2.Varga announced an ngen clone back in July; see http://lists.ximian.com/archives/public/mono-list/2002-July/001117.html for the announcement. Much discussion followed; it's by no means perfect, but it's a start.
As for the question in your message body (native executable to CIL), it might be possible. Maybe. I can certainly imagine that, for some subset of programs, it would be possible to interpret the instruction stream and transform the stream to CIL. However, this would be for a very limited subset of programs, as some programs require certain memory layouts, interrupts, etc., that cannot be represented by CIL. (A good example of this would be a DOS program, which expects memory to be in certain spots, and directly invokes interrupts for the DOS equivalent of system calls.) If a program never used interrupts, never directly used hardware, and lots of other restrictions I'm sure I don't know, it might be possible to convert it to CIL. For example, it seams that it should be reasonable to take a C program that only uses `printf' (dynamically linked to the program) to be converted to CIL. The compiler would only need to add a P/Invoke call for `printf' (probably possible from the ELF header) and convert the instruction stream. Except that doing so would require that whatever platform the resulting CIL code executed on had a library (libc.so) with the required export (printf). Meaning it couldn't work on .NET. So, yes, it might be possible for some subset of programs, but it would be very difficult, and will not work as expected some (most?) of the time. Finally, no one (that I'm aware of) has started working on such a thing. The issues described above are probably why. - Jon On Thu, 2002-09-19 at 10:56, mani gandan wrote: > Hi, > > any tool to convert CIL from native executable? > > manigandan > > __________________________________________________ > Do you Yahoo!? > New DSL Internet Access from SBC & Yahoo! > http://sbc.yahoo.com > > _______________________________________________ > Mono-list maillist - [EMAIL PROTECTED] > http://lists.ximian.com/mailman/listinfo/mono-list _______________________________________________ Mono-list maillist - [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.ximian.com/mailman/listinfo/mono-list
