Microsoft Roslyn: Reinventing the Compiler As We Know It

snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister sees Microsoft's Project Roslyn potentially reinventing how we view compilers and compiled languages. 'Roslyn is a complete reengineering of Microsoft's .NET compiler toolchain in a new way, such that each phase of the code compilation process is exposed as a service that can be consumed by other applications,' McAllister writes. 'The most obvious advantage of this kind of "deconstructed" compiler is that it allows the entire compile-execute process to be invoked from within .NET applications. With the Roslyn technology, C# may still be a compiled language, but it effectively gains all the flexibility and expressiveness that dynamic languages such as Python and Ruby have to offer.'"

Comments

old news?

[Verunks]

yeah I know I must be new here http://developers.slashdot.org/story/11/09/16/0253202/microsoft-previews-compiler-as-a-service-software

Never heard of Clang?

[gnasher719]

It seems that Neil McAllister has never heard of LLVM and Clang, while Microsoft obviously has.

LISP had that 40 years ago

[Animats]

This isn't exactly new. LISP had it from the early days. It's an idea that's been tried before, now available with more modern buzzwords, like "the compiler as a service".

.NET as a virtual machine environment has become somewhat pointless, since the Windows/.NET environment is pretty much "write once, run on X86" now. Itanium support was dropped in 2010, and Microsoft's "Windows 8 for ARM" is apparently Metro-only.

Re:3 years ago

[sourcerror]

Tiny C compiler does this for years:
http://bellard.org/tcc/

Features

SMALL! You can compile and execute C code everywhere, for example on rescue disks (about 100KB for x86 TCC executable, including C preprocessor, C compiler, assembler and linker).

FAST! tcc generates x86 code. No byte code overhead. Compile, assemble and link several times faster than GCC.

UNLIMITED! Any C dynamic library can be used directly. TCC is heading torward full ISOC99 compliance. TCC can of course compile itself.

SAFE! tcc includes an optional memory and bound checker. Bound checked code can be mixed freely with standard code.
Compile and execute C source directly. No linking or assembly necessary. Full C preprocessor and GNU-like assembler included.

C script supported : just add '#!/usr/local/bin/tcc -run' at the first line of your C source, and execute it directly from the command line.

With libtcc, you can use TCC as a backend for dynamic code generation.

Re:3 years ago

[TheRaven64]

LLVM is a better example. It's a set of libraries for generating a code in an intermediate representation, transforming that representation (usually for optimisation, but also for instrumentation and other things) and then emitting it as object code, assembly, or JIT'd executable code in memory. I've written compilers for Smalltalk and for a toy JavaScript-like language using it, and they share the same set of optimisations that I wrote for Objective-C and the same object model. The total amount of Smalltalk-specific code is about 15KLoC (including comments).