Compiling NESL into Java

We motivate and describe the design and implementation of a system for
compiling the high-level programming language NESL into Java.  As
well as increasing the portability of NESL, this system has enabled
us to make existing simulations and algorithm animations available in
applet form on the web.  We present performance results showing that
current Java virtual machines running the generated code achieve about
half the performance of hand-tuned C.  We conclude that the use of
Java as an intermediate language is a viable way to improve the
portability of existing high-level programming languages for
scientific simulation and computation.