The process of translating IDL files into a source code tree. In Netscape Extension Builder, the KIDL Compiler uses IDL files to generate Java or C++ source code. The KIDL Compiler is invoked by running the gmake utility from an extension's top-level build directory.
In computer science, code generation is the process by which a compiler's code generator converts a syntactically correct program into a series of instructions that could be executed by a machine. Sophisticated compilers may use several cascaded code generation stages to fully compile code; this is due to the fact that algorithms for code optimization are more readily applicable in an intermediate code form, and also facilitates a single compiler that can target multiple architectures called target machines as only the final code generation stage (the backend) would need to change from target to target.