Can a scripting language be translated into other languages?

Question

Can a scripting language be translated into C, C++, or Java so it can be run on an IDE without rewriting the code?

Answer 1

There is a programming language called Haxe that can be translated into C++, Java, Javascript, C# and several other languages. This language appeared relatively recently, and is designed to be translated into as many target languages as possible.

Answer 2

For C, there are some scripting languages which look a little like C. Maybe that's a starting point. Lua comes to my mind.

For java, there is a scripting language, beanshell/bsh which runs a simplified java code as script. But you would have to rewrite it to make Javacode out of it, and I don't know how easy the process would be, to make this automatically happen.

A different approach would be: Write an C interpreter, so you can use C-Code for scriping, and just compile it when you need to.

Answer 3

Take a look at shedskin for an example of a Python to C++ translator. It isn't perfect. It has some limitations on what code can be translated. But in general it works.

The main reason to do so, in this case, is speed and ease of integration with other existing C++ software.

Answer 4

In theory, yes it's possible. Depending on the scripting language and it supporting "virtual machine", there are tools to do this (semi-)automatically. The more heavily interpreted the language is the less likely you will be able to translate the code (for example, translating an HTML webpage into native C is kinda ridiculous, as opposed to translating matlab code into C or C++). In general, generic tools for translating code are rarely good enough that you can compile and run the code that is produced, very often they will do most of the syntax translation (basically find & replace operations) and maybe some more advanced stuff. But, most of the time, you will still have significant work to do (like using google translator to translate a webpage from one language to another, it is never perfect and it depends on how close the two languages are).

In my opinion, however, I would say that code translation is a very dangerous business. It is a lot easier to make typos or other mistakes when you are manually rewriting code that you know very little about. An automatic translation tool won't perform much better on that front either. And then, once you have translated the code, what if there are bugs? How are you supposed to find them? and fix them? when you know very little about the actual code. This can very rapidly become a nightmarish experience. I have done it in the past, and don't do it anymore!

BTW: if you are looking to use code that is written in a script language inside a project written in another language, then you might consider interfacing the languages instead of translating one code to the other language. Most programming languages and scripting languages have facilities to interface with other languages (e.g. DLLs or COM/ActiveX components). It is always better to preserve the code in the language it was originally written if at all possible.

Answer 5

In theory, yes, it is possible to translate any scripting language into C, C++, or Java code. A theoretically valid way of doing this would be to take the source code for the interpreter and then to hardcode in the script that it's going to be executing. The resulting code would then be "run the interpreter written in C/C++/Java on the specified source code."

In practice, there usually isn't a good way of translating from a scripting language to some other target language in a way that preserves the original coding style. Each language has its own constructs, idioms, and idiosyncrasies and in translating from the source scripting language to a target language much of the original structure is lost. That said, there are many projects that do this sort of conversion for performance reasons. For example, Facebook's HipHop compiler translates PHP into C++ for efficiency reasons. The resulting code is not intended to be read by humans, though.

So in short, yes, it can be done, but not in a way that's going to result in pretty code.