Code generation: C++ vs. Java

Code generation can be very useful by reducing the amount of code that is needed to be written, tested, debugged, maintained, etc. But if you develop the code generation yourself, code generation can be a nightmare. Getting the code generator right can be very hard, especialley so if the generator needs to support more than one target language (the output language).

The last code generator I wrote was for a private project. I've always wanted to design and implement my own programming language, and this spring I finally started to implement a compiler (actually it was source-to-source translator that outputted C++ code) for my language, which I call Fit. This was the first translator/code generator I've written that generates C++ code.

I'm not a big fan of C++, I think it's a too complex language that forces you to think about low-level implementation details. Thus, since my brain is limited, I have less brain-cycles to think about the high-level design of the application.

So why did I choose to translate Fit to C++ if C++ is so hard? Well, my other alternaive was Java, but since I already had written a couple of generator for Java I thought that a generator for C++ would be a fun experience.

Actually it was a really nice experience! Having access to all the low level details (e.g., pointer arithmitics and goto) and the high-level constructs (e.g., operator overloading) made it relatively easy to translate Fit to C++. When implementing the Fit-to-C++ translator I really saw the difference in power between C++ and Java.

Java, although a good language, is not a powerful language. In Java you can do certain very easy, but as soon you need to do things the language wasn't designed for you will have a bad experience. Ever tried to write bit manipulations in Java? It's not fun I tell you. In C++ at least you have the option to implement it using operator overloading and templates to make is less of a burden. I Java, that option is not available.

To take a concrete example from the Fit compiler/translator: yield is translated to (efficient) C++ using a switch and a goto. I'm not sure how to implement it in Java, but I guess you would have to do some work-around using a do-while construct.

So what am I'm saying? Is C++ a good language? Well, no it's not good if a human being writes it, but it is actually good if a code generator writes it. All the low-level stuff actually simplifies the generator.