Confusion of Babel

I really would like to put a functional layer in the cross-VM stack, but...

Ocamljava and F# might be code compatible, but the former has a cumbersome build and interop process (and doesn't seem to advertise call-from-Java); while Bigloo seems entirely silent on interop.

Cross-compiling Scala class bytecodes to CLR doesn't seem to be a goer -- IKVM balks at referencing CLR 2.0 assemblies. I might be able decompile the classes and rebuild them via J# -- the hiccup there is that I would have to translate the runtime .jar as well -- my simple "Hello World!" level class decompiles to invoke scala.runtime.BoxesRunTime, but that's not in any of the scalac-net assemblies. On the up-side that would remove any nagging issues about CLR 2.0 compatibility, though; on the down-side, it would mean that I need a decompiler able to handle the generated code... Jode -- which I happened to have to hand -- balked at half the classes in the runtime; Jad seemed to have dealt with them all, though with a lot of goto statements replacing things like jumps out of loops -- but leaves a lot of JVM INSTR monitorenter;...JVM INSTR monitorexit; where a synchronized{} block should be, and possibly other horrors.

Meanwhile I took another prod at scalac-net, using the magic -Ydebug flag:

>\scala-2.6.1-final\bin\scalac-net -d classes -Xassem-path JavaLayer.dll SClass.
scala  -Ydebug
[running phase parser on SClass.scala]
[running phase namer on SClass.scala]
java.lang.ClassCastException: scala.tools.nsc.symtab.Symbols$ClassSymbol cannot
be cast to scala.runtime.Nothing$
        at scala.tools.nsc.symtab.clr.TypeParser.parseClass(TypeParser.scala:77)

        at scala.tools.nsc.symtab.clr.TypeParser.parse(TypeParser.scala:58)
        at scala.tools.nsc.symtab.SymbolLoaders$MSILTypeLoader.doComplete(Symbol
Loaders.scala:263)
        at scala.tools.nsc.symtab.SymbolLoaders$SymbolLoader.complete(SymbolLoad
ers.scala:54)
...
java.io.IOException: type 'scala.Predef' is broken
(scala.tools.nsc.symtab.Symbols$ClassSymbol cannot be cast to scala.runtime.Nothing$)
...

Kudos to the scala implementors -- the line numbers match up down the stack, and show the culprit to be

      unpickler.unpickle(symtab, 0, clazz.asInstanceOf, staticModule.asInstanceOf, typ.FullName);

which looks like it's doing the right sort of thing; and there's nothing particularly odd about the scala.Predef class in the assembly; and I get the same error trying to compile some of the examples in the distro...

Next diversion, rebuilding scalac with more instrumentation, piling the tower higher.