Intermediate Language - Languages

Languages

Though not explicitly designed as an intermediate language, C's nature as an abstraction of assembly and its ubiquity as the de facto system language in Unix-like and other operating systems has made it a popular intermediate language: Eiffel, Sather, Esterel, some dialects of Lisp (Lush, Gambit), Haskell (Glasgow Haskell Compiler), Squeak's Smalltalk-subset Slang, Cython, Seed7, Vala, and others make use of C as an intermediate language. Variants of C have been designed to provide C's features as a portable assembly language, including one of the two languages called C-- and the C Intermediate Language.

Sun Microsystem's Java bytecode is the intermediate language used by all compilers targeting the Java Virtual Machine. The JVM can then do just-in-time compilation to get executable machine code to improve performance. Similarly, Microsoft's Common Intermediate Language is an intermediate language designed to be shared by all compilers for the .NET Framework, before static or dynamic compilation to machine code.

The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) uses internally several intermediate languages to simplify portability and cross-compilation. Among these languages are

• the historical Register Transfer Language (RTL)
• the tree language GENERIC
• the SSA-based GIMPLE.

While most intermediate languages are designed to support statically typed languages, the Parrot intermediate representation is designed to support dynamically typed languages—initially Perl and Python.

The ILOC intermediate language is used in classes on compiler design as a simple target language.