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Which Approach for Perl?

Given the various categories of JVM ports, the key question is which method should be used for Perl. In this work, we describe two approaches that were attempted. Both approaches attempt to leverage the existing perl compiler (which is discussed in detail in Chapter 3).

The first approach was roughly a direct compilation method--retargeting perl to the JVM via the Jasmin assembler. Chapter 4 discusses this effort, and why it ultimately failed.

The second approach is a somewhat novel approach. A ``middle layer'' intermediate representation provided by newer versions of Kawa [5] is used to mitigate the problems found in the first approach. Chapter 5 discusses this effort.


Copyright © 2000, 2001 Bradley M. Kuhn.

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