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by pjmlp 935 days ago
One that I left out, Project Phoenix from Microsoft Research, using MSIL for similar purposes, with C# and C++ compilers.

Unfortunely when they killed the project, little was left on the Internet, and they have other projects with the same name.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Phoenix

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/channel-9-video-andy-...

The paper "An overview of the PL.8 compiler" refers to how they implemented a multi-stage IL pipeline to write a mostly safe systems programming for IBM RISC project.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/800230.806977

Unfortunely there isn't much publicly available, and IBM eventually pivoted the RISC efforts into AIX, thus abandoning this effort.

Amsterdam Compiler Toolkit used EM intermediate language as its bitcode format,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amsterdam_Compiler_Kit

If you delve into ACM, IEEE, SIGPLAN and related stuff, there will be similar projects, LLVM ended up getting the spotlight thanks to Apple and Google's sponsorship, followed by others in the industry.

I still hope that GraalVM (nee MaximeVM at Sun Research Labs) will keep going, as it is yet another approach for compiler toolkits, with a safer language.

1 comments

>One that I left out, Project Phoenix from Microsoft Research, using MSIL for similar purposes, with C# and C++ compilers.

Can't CoreCLR be used for the same stuff?

Not really, this was something like LLVM.

For some workflows, it might be doable, for the whole package, what people use compiler frameworks for, CoreCLR still lacks many knobs.