.NET 泛型移植到舊有系統之二進位碼轉換

Abstract

Generic programming recently has been commercially implemented into several popular programming languages, such as Java and C#, because of its productivity improvement to the software developers. We design and implement a deploy-time binary file translator for .NET executable files, also called “Assembly” files in .NET glossary, which translates the generic code. The binary file translator makes the generic code executable in the previous version of the runtime framework that did not support generics. Our whole implementation is based on the shared source runtime implementation of Microsoft’s .NET Framework. Our research first elaborates all of the translation techniques for parametric polymorphism and compares the different translations. Then, we implement the binary file translator to translate the generic code in a .NET application file into a non-generic application file that provides exactly the same functionality. This binary translator is especially useful when the users are not able to upgrade the .NET runtime version in a deployment environment, but they would still like to leverage the power of new generics feature in the programming language while developing the application. In this case, the user can develop the application with generics and build the executable assembly file then use the translator to transform the application into the non-generic form with the same functionality. On the other hand, the translator can also help to reduce resources, such as space, when some users deploy the application with generic code to those limited-resource embedded devices with .NET Compact Framework.