understanding generated bytecode

On Mon, Nov 9, 2009 at 11:21 AM, Miguel Garcia wrote:
> I've been exploring what the nsc generated bytecode looks like, using the
> following decompiler
>
>  McGill's "Dava" Java Decompiler http://www.sable.mcgill.ca/dava/
>
> One of the explicit goals of Dava is to generate compilable Java from
> non-Java bytecode (that's the idea).
> Some things work and others don't. Has anybody tried other ways to get a
> high-level view of nsc-generated bytecode?

You can use scalac -Xprint: to get an idea of what scalac is
doing. Especially using -Xprint:jvm should give something very close
to bytecodes. Low-level inspection tools are javap and scalap (though,
I don't know what the latter one does exactly. IMO it just prints the
serialized scala signatures).

What do you expect from a high-level view of bytecodes?

Johannes,

Yes, javap and scalap show what's inside the generated .class files but
still I would prefer an IDE-level bytecode browser (with navigation, too?).
So I might settle on the Eclipse plugin for Soot, which can for example
display bytecode using the Grimp notation (well, the following screenshot
shows Jimple, but conveys the idea):
http://www.sable.mcgill.ca/soot/eclipse/ca.mcgill.sable.soot/doc/concept...
unless someone suggests sthg better.

After getting an overview of some (not all :-) of the name mangling and
codegen patterns, I *would like* later to try some bytecode-level automatic
verfication techniques, e.g.
http://www-sop.inria.fr/everest/BML/Introduction.html#Introduction
or the aforementioned Findbugs.

Miguel
http://www.sts.tu-harburg.de/people/mi.garcia