JVM backend for Stratego?

Talked to Martin about the possibility of a JVM backend for Stratego. He told me he had considered it, but that it wasn't top priority.

The main problem, Martin pointed out, is that vital parts of the Stratego library has been rewritten in the later years from an abstract level of readfile to fopen, thus tieing it tightly to C/POSIX.

Both Rob and me pointed out that we could add namespaces to the library, thus clearly marking out Unix-specific parts and Java-specific parts. Namespaces is something I have wanted to work on anyway.

However, upon later reflection I don't think it is all that desirable to keep the all the legacy code after all. We will undoubtedly write a lot of stuff afresh, for specific purposes related directly to the Java platform.

In fact, if Stratego on JVM is to make any sense, Stratego code must be able to call Java libraries, in which case, the Unix-specific bits of the Stratego library is automaticaly supplanted by the much richer Java library.

Again, with proper namespacing, it will also be obvious for developers when they are relying on Unix-specific or Java-specific library calls.