Survey of Approaches

Since the JNI is not a clear path to a full JVM port, other methods must be considered. Traditionally, there have been four ways in which languages are ported to the JVM ^2.1.

The traditional approaches are as follows:

• Implementation of a language interpreter in Java.

• Compilation from the source language to Java source.

• Direct compilation from the source language to JVM bytecode.

• Mapping of language structures and idioms onto the JVM.

In the subsequent subsections, each of these approaches is considered in detail.

Copyright © 2000, 2001 Bradley M. Kuhn.

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