Modern software is often designed to run on a virtual machine, such as the JVM or .NET’s CLR. Increasingly, even the web browser is considered a target platform with the Javascript engine as its virtual machine. The choice of programming language for a project is therefore restricted to the languages which target the desired platform. As a result, an important consideration for a programming language designer is the platform to be targetted. For a language to be truly cross-platform, it must not only support different operating systems (e.g. Windows, OSX and Linux) but it must also target different virtual machine environments such as JVM, .NET, Javascript and others. In this paper, I describe how this problem is addressed in the Idris programming language. The overall compilation process involves a number of intermediate representations and Idris exposes an interface to each of these representations, allowing back ends for different target platforms to decide which is most appropriate. I show how to use these representations to retarget Idris for multiple platforms, and further show how to build a generic foreign function interface supporting multiple platforms.
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