Portability in Incremental Compilers

Compilers form the backbone of the field of computing nowadays. Computation has diversified from the initially acclaimed fields of research, to a tool for entertainment and application development. As computers gained popularity, users demanded more from it, and consequently, they began to develop applications that suited their needs on their own. For this, programming languages were developed. But as needs diversified, people needed more features, which led to more and more languages, stressing on the usability and friendliness. But in all this rapid development, languages began to branch out, with less common features and overlapping. So, it became difficult to integrate and incorporate features between languages. This resulted in development od cross-language interfaces. Also, with the diversification of operating systems, target languages began to vary, and interfaces found it difficult to cope with changes in platform. So, the search was on to find a technology that can solve the language and platform barrier, ultimately making applications robust, user-friendly and powerful. Here, we examine one possible solution for this. We stress upon the intermediate code which is the result of partial compilation. If we can make this code language and platform independent, we can easily solve the issue. This is particularly useful in incremental compilers, which face the challenge of patching up executable code modules.