Looking to write a new Bytecode back-end (Gen) for microcontroller VM

[Niels Brouwers]

Jon,

that sounds like it just might work. Thanks a lot! I'll try it
tomorrow (I'm in an Australian timezone), and let you know how it
worked out.

Cheers,

Niels

On Wed, Jul 9, 2008 at 10:01 PM, Jonathan Gibbons
<Jonathan.Gibbons at sun.com> wrote:
> Niels,
>
> You can use javac's Context mechanism to preRegister your own implementation
> of Gen.  To do this, you'd want to modify com.sun.tools.javac.main.Main to
> put
> a factory for your Gen into the context as soon as the context is created.
>
> (There are two ways to preregister code like this -- you can either put an
> instance
> in the context directory, or you can put a factory to create an instance. In
> this case,
> a factory would likely be better because you do not want to create Gen to
> early
> and have it trigger the creation of all the other components on which it
> depends.)
>
> You might also want to use your own impl of ClassWriter as well.
>
> -- Jon
>
> On Jul 8, 2008, at 10:04 PM, Niels Brouwers wrote:
>
>> Hello all,
>>
>> I hope that this mailing list is the correct medium for asking this
>> question. If not, please forgive my intrusion.
>>
>> I'm writing a Java virtual machine for microcontrollers, and since the
>> Java instruction set is not suitable for such platforms (32-bit stack
>> width is the main problem) I would like to build my own bytecode
>> back-end (Gen).
>>
>> I've been hacking the compiler a bit today, but found it extremely
>> difficult to extend or change the behavior of Javac in a non-intrusive
>> way. I would basically like to re-use all of Javac, and simply drop in
>> my own bytecode generator visitor.
>>
>> Before I go further with this I was wondering what the best approach
>> would be. Can I keep most of the Javac functionality or do I need to
>> write most of it from scratch?
>>
>> Thanks in advance,
>>
>> Niels Brouwers
>
>