Executable ideas (Discussion)

[julianlore]

What should the executable be able to do?
I think it should be able take in either a .java file or a .class file (call javac as needed if a .java file) and then with the bytecode it would be able to:

• Pretty print the IR (similar to javap -v)
• Create a corresponding .class file after having passed through the optimizer

[AllanWang]

I've currently written the majority of parts required to convert from .class files to the IR format. The format itself isn't set in stone, and for testing it would probably be easiest if we can parse other formats such as that of krakatau. I was also wondering if we wanted to support parsing javap output, since it looks like they do have enough information to generate classfiles, though not nicely packages. Krakatau's constant pool variant (to generate the same class data) works fine, but isn't as readable, whereas javap's version is readable, but more annoying to parse.

For .java to .class, we'll just rely on javac, since that seems like a much harder problem if you consider validation.

[AllanWang]

If we want we can discuss about how we want our .j format to be. It's currently a mix between javap (without -v) and krakatau