TL;DR PageFX compiler is really interesting because it is compiler

In my previous post I’ve shortly written about PageFX cross compiler. Its code is available on github now.

What makes this project interesting for compiler writers?

Here is my top reasons:

• Compilers are complicated things and so it is interesting for learning
• It has a lot of IL code generation (only getting native strings support were not easy to do)
• It has direct instruction-level translation between byte code formats
• It incrementally compiles only classes and methods called from program entry point
• It has smart linker that resolves dependency graph and emits only required resources extracted and transcoded (deserialized and serialized) from SWF files
• It has experimental generation of JavaScript code by implementing a little CIL interpretter in JavaScript
• It has experimental CIL interpretter written in C#

So please go ahead and learn PageFX reading its codebase.

You might also find interesting this old project available on github. It has declarative CIL reader written in JavaScript. This could be a starting point for full CIL interpreter in JavaScript. You can take this CIL interpretter as example and complete it. Feel free to fork and play anyway.

If someone interested to get more details about PageFX project please email me. I can write a series of blog posts perhaps someone may find it interesting.

P.S. Anyone wanted to compile PageFX with latest C# compiler? Please send pull request :)