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Paper: CrossTL: A Universal Programming Language Translator with Unified Intermediate Representation

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  Paper: CrossTL: A Universal Programming Language Translator with Unified Intermediate Representation John R Levine <johnl@taugh.com> - 2025-09-01 11:16 +0200
    Re: Paper: CrossTL: A Universal Programming Language Translator with Unified Intermediate Representation Derek <derek@shape-of-code.com> - 2025-09-02 12:45 +0100

#3695 — Paper: CrossTL: A Universal Programming Language Translator with Unified Intermediate Representation

This is a very old idea, dating back to UNCOL in the late 1950s.
Invent a universal intermediate language so you just have to write a front
end or back end per input or output language.  It works somewhat when the
inputs and outputs are semantically close enough, viz the LLVM
intermediate language, but has always hit the wall when the languages are
too different.


https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21256
Abstract
We present CrossTL, a universal programming language translator enabling
bidirectional translation between multiple languages through a unified
intermediate representation called CrossGL. Traditional approaches require
separate translators for each language pair, leading to exponential
complexity growth. CrossTL uses a single universal IR to facilitate
translations between CUDA, HIP, Metal, DirectX HLSL, OpenGL GLSL, Vulkan
SPIR-V, Rust, and Mojo, with Slang support in development. Our system
consists of: language-specific lexers/parsers converting source code to
ASTs, bidirectional CrossGL translation modules implementing
ToCrossGLConverter classes for importing code and CodeGen classes for
target generation, and comprehensive backend implementations handling full
translation pipelines. We demonstrate effectiveness through comprehensive
evaluation across programming domains, achieving successful compilation
and execution across all supported backends. The universal IR design
enables adding new languages with minimal effort, requiring only
language-specific frontend/backend components. Our contributions include:
(1) a unified IR capturing semantics of multiple programming paradigms,
(2) a modular architecture enabling extensibility, (3) a comprehensive
framework supporting GPU compute, graphics programming, and systems
languages, and (4) empirical validation demonstrating practical viability
of universal code translation. CrossTL represents a significant step
toward language-agnostic programming, enabling write-once,
deploy-everywhere development.


Regards,
John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Taughannock Networks, Trumansburg NY
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly

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#3696

John,

> Invent a universal intermediate language so you just have to write a front
> end or back end per input or output language.  It works somewhat when the
> inputs and outputs are semantically close enough, viz the LLVM
> intermediate language, but has always hit the wall when the languages are
> too different.

The purpose of a universal intermediate language is to reduce
the cost of 1-to-1 translation from an n^2 problem to a linear
problem in n.

An alternative approach is to brute force it by training an
LLM on lots of code.

"In the WMT25 competition, the model achieved first place in 30 out of the 31
language categories it participated in."

https://github.com/Tencent-Hunyuan/Hunyuan-MT
[That model translates natural languages, like Ukranian to Mongolian.
I don't see how that's relevant to translating computer languages.  In
the former case, pretty close is useful, in the latter, pretty close
is a program that doesn't work. -John]

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