Interactive simulations on the Web: 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 a native implementation of NESL. 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. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.