Language translators: Anything to Assembly

Question

Im just curious if there is is any sort of program/application out there that will allow to enter code in one language and translate that to another language such as asm. This seems perfectly possible....so does anything like this exist?

Answer 1

Yes. They are called compilers.

Compilers are just one example of a class of programs called language-translators.

Compilers convert higher-level languages, such as C++ and Java into lower-level languages, including virtual machine byte-codes, assembly, C, or directly into machine-runnable object-code.

Answer 2

It's effectively what any compilator does since assembler is just another form of machine code. I believe that GCC does this explicitly, and that you can ask it to show you the intermediate assembler. For instance, take a look at the GNU Assembler.

Answer 3

Here is a program for converting .NET code to Java, PHP, JavaScript and ActionScript http://jsc.sourceforge.net/

Answer 4

There are tools that allow you to translate one language into another. Basically, there's a parser, a translator, and printer.

The parser obviously parses the source into a AST.

The translator then has to transform the AST into structures that make sense in the target language.

Finally, the printer understands the post-transformed structures and can output that target code.

Answer 5

Issues arise when you say that something is "perfectly possible." A feature of one language often does not translate directly or easily to another; that's why we choose a language for a task in the first place! For example, converting a fibonacci number from Java to C is trivial, but to Haskell? Sure, it's still doable, but try converting a program that opens posix threads and listens on multiple ports for various bits of network traffic.

Almost every piece of useful code relies on extensively on external libraries, many of which are not open source. Aside from this, what do you think the following should translate to in C? Java even?

def method( f ):
    G = {'a':1}
    f(G)

def f( x ):
    print( [ (key, value) for (key,value) in x.items() ] )

method(f)

This task is inherently more complicated than it seems for anything but the most trivial case (C-language to C-language.) Going between static and dynamically typed languages will be rough, as will anything language specific.

Answer 6

You may be interested haXe, see http://haxe.org/.