Code Refractor 0.0.1 - First release is available

After close of 7 months of development (the project I started it at the start of April, before making it public), first release of CodeRefractor is here.

What it contains compared with the very first introduction? Many CIL instructions and some generics support is there. Compared with introduction of CodeRefractor which was basically able to set fields, arrays and math, and compared with this, I will try to summarize what happened in between:
- most of development is documented, look into Documentation folder (using the .docx format) about the main subsystems
- compiler optimizations are not naive implementations: they are more powerful and they have been using a use-def so the optimizations are understanding the code more precisely; similarly the compiler branching is based on usages and definitions so many intermediary variables are removed naturally by the compiler; an inliner implementation works intelligently
- the runtime is mostly written in C# and is possible to add more methods by writting C# and C++ annotations
- many CIL instructions are implemented, making C# only implementations (that do not depend on System runtime too much) to work. The biggest not-implemented I can say that are delegates. Some partial implementations of generics (very limited), unsafe code is done
- a primitive logic of class hierarchy analysis is done, and as implementation will mature, expect that many devirtualization would be done safely and correctly by the compiler
- unique (in my knowledge) for CIL implementations, the purity and escape analysis allow more optimizations to be really aggressive: calling pure functions with constants is the same as calling the result constant, so Math.Sin(0) is always evaluated as 0 (zero), or for a program taking care of the fact that CR does escape analysis, that objects are allocated on stack or the smart pointers are converted (safely) to raw pointers improving runtime performance. This can generate final code that faster than .Net programs.
- the optimizer works like a global optimizer which makes possible some inter procedural (entire program) operations: program wide merging of array data, strings and PInvoke methods makes your final program to be smaller

Even many things work, the release has many cut corners, and some parts were written very bug prone, so expect that the resulted C++ code to not compile, and as the runtime has no classes in themselves, also expect that no non-trivial program to compile. If it compiles, it should run fast.

After you extract this release, which is just a .zip file, you should copy a GCC distribution. For simplicity I'm using the great Orwell's DevC++ and I copy the C:\Dev-Cpp\MinGW64 as: <CodeRefractorPath>\Lib\Gcc Please notice that you will have to rename the folder at the end, but other than this, it should work just fine.

Anyway, many things are missing and everyone is encouraged to test it and to implement small stuff starting from the GitHub project: every small piece in place makes your program to be closer to working, or if it is working already to work better and more stable.

For questions and feedback you can use Google Groups page.