Sign Up to our social questions and Answers Engine to ask questions, answer people’s questions, and connect with other people.
Login to our social questions & Answers Engine to ask questions answer people’s questions & connect with other people.
Lost your password? Please enter your email address. You will receive a link and will create a new password via email.
Please briefly explain why you feel this question should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this answer should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this user should be reported.
I cant even begin to understand how they work, its a very broad question i guess. How is it possible that one could take a language such as C# which is compiled to IL for the CLR, then further JIT compiled into machine code at run time, and write an Interpreter or REPL for it as implemented in the mono project. How did they get that right?
What is the issue? Machine code is just some data (laying in virtual memory pages which are executable). You can produce that data, then, since it is also code, run it.
You can produce machine code in memory in various ways. For example, you could use LLVM or libjit or many other libraries (or even make your own).
Some implementations of some langauges (I was thinking of the SBCL implementation of Common Lisp) are even able to translate to machine code every line you are interactively typing. And this is not new, some 1957 computers did it (e.g. the French CAB500 for PAF).
You can even generate some source code (e.g. in C), fork a compilation process, then dynamically load that code, e.g. with dlopen(3). Current compilers and processors are fast enough to make that compatible with delays for user-friendly interaction. My MELT domain specific language (to extend GCC) does that successfully.
AS commented by millimoose, Mono is free software, so you can study its code.
The equivalence of code and data is a fundamental property of computers. Likewise the equivalence of numbers and demonstrations in a fundamental insight of Gödel and Turing (and when you hear your favorite MP3 music, you use that too).