Cibyl 7 review

Cibyl is a programming environment that allows compiled C programs to execute on J2ME-capable phones

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 0K Developer: Simon Kagstrom

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Cibyl is a programming environment that allows compiled C programs to execute on J2ME-capable phones. Cibyl uses GCC to compile the C programs to MIPS binaries, and these are then recompiled into Java bytecode.

The programs are not parsed during runtime, and Cibyl is therefore relatively well-performing. With Cibyl, games written in C can be ported to J2ME without switching language. The environment is tied to the GNU compiler tools (GCC and binutils) and only tested on Linux so far although it should work in other environments as well.

There are two reasons why I want Cibyl. First, C is in my opinion a much better suited language for writing games than Java. Also, since I have a couple of old games written in C, I would like to port them to the J2ME environment without rewriting the entire games. The goal is therefore to be able to only port the game to a another API instead of porting the game to another language.

The name started out as Nophun, a pun on Mophun, but has now changed to Cibyl (since it is so fun!). Cibyl is an abbreviation of something, but only the C, meaning C has been fixed so far.

What's New in This Release:
Cibyl now generates one Java method per C function, which improves performance and enables profiling of Cibyl programs.
Register/local variable use has been optimized, which saves space.
A more efficient C implementation of malloc has been added.
Initial limited support for floating point operations has been implemented, and various minor issues and bugs have been fixed.