[Mono-list] Questions mostly about IL asembler

[Miguel de Icaza]

Hello Nick,

   Please get in touch with Sergey, as he is also interested in
working on this (serge@wildwestsoftware.com):

> 1) When referring to IL byte code files, are we talking about
> human-readable text files with “.assembly”,
> “.entrypoint”, etc. commands in them?  Is this what
> the IL assembler would parse and “compile” into a PE
> file?  The PE file would contain binary data (just like
> exe’s and dll’s now) that would not be human
> readable?  Am I understanding this correctly?

The idea is to take CIL source code and generate PE-COFF with the byte
codes.

This is really simple using C# and the System.Reflection.Emit.

> 2) Miguel, you want the IL assembler to be written in C#?  If this
> is true, are there any parts of the C# tokenizer or compiler that
> can be re-used for that? 

You might want to write your own tokenizer.  A complete new parser
will be required.

> 3) You used your port of Jay for the C# compiler, but on the website
> you say you want to move to Bison. However, Bison can only produce C
> or C++ files right now.  Which do you prefer, using Jay for Ilasm
> now, or waiting for some other Bison/C# solution?

Jay.cs was a port of Yacc to Java;  I later ported it to C#.

Bison is better than Jay, but uses the same syntax and has the same
effects (modulo a few details).  So we will be porting `JB' which is a
Bison for Java to be Bison for C#.

The bottom line is: use Jay for now.

> 4) I take it from other posts that Portable.net’s ilsam
> solution is not appropriate for Mono?  Why is that, or have I
> misunderstood?  

In reality, Mono does not even need an assembler to create executables
because we use System.Reflection.Emit (btw, last night I got the first
"image" built, with only empty interfaces on it).  

It is a low priority item, but it will be useful for people who:

	* Write IL source code.

	* GUI front-ends that might want to integrate compilation of
          both .cs, and .il

	* Complete the SDK.

Miguel.