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

## TL;DR

CrossTL introduces a universal programming language translator using a single intermediate representation, enabling bidirectional translation across multiple languages and graphics APIs, simplifying multi-language support and deployment.

## Contribution

It presents a unified IR and modular architecture that supports diverse programming languages and graphics APIs, facilitating easy addition of new languages with minimal effort.

## Key findings

- Successful compilation and execution across all supported backends
- Effective translation between multiple programming languages and graphics APIs
- Demonstrated extensibility and practical viability of the framework

## 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.