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Does JVM qualify? Different languages Java Scala etc compile to IL. Run analysis tools on that.

• nnq 9y ago
  NO. Far from it. I can't work on a codebase with a colleague, me writing/reading the code in Scala, he/she writing/reading the same code in Java or Kotlin. I can't code a project in Clojure, then hand it over to a team of programmers that see it and work on it as Java code. JVM languages are too different from one another (and the "common language" underneath, whatever is it called, it's waay too low level to qualify, practically no one writes/reads it). Different syntaxes would mean need to share a different semantic common to all to have seamless translation. (And yeah, apart from some academic experiments I think we're far from abstract syntax independent semantics in any production used programming language. To actually be able to treat the multiple JVM languages as syntaxes of the same language with a "seamless" experience you'd need code analysis tools of almost-superhuman intelligence. By that point we'd be out of job anyway ;)
• empath75 9y ago
  If the jvm does, then assembly does. I think the main reason that this wouldn’t work is that compilation isn’t perfectly reversible. Information is lost. I think you will always have this problem with translation and it’s a analogous to the idea of two people working on a novel, one in French, the other in English, with neither knowing the other language, expecting the word processor to come up with some lower representation that it can use to translate flawlessly back and forth.