11–20 of 136 posts
I find amusing how microsoft moved from the closed source referent in the industry into such an open source player. Right now even allows to hook some of their tools and platforms to its competing platforms and tools.
I find amusing how microsoft moved from the closed source referent in the industry into such an open source player. Right now even allows to hook some of their tools and platforms to its competing platforms and tools.
I think they are really repositioning the company as powering general computing through their cloud platform as opposed to powering general computing through their OS.
I still can't believe more people aren't leveraging the Roslyn APIs to write compiler extensions or additional tools around C#. It's conceptually powerful.
Personally speaking, I'd love to, but I'd then have to figure out how to make them work with an IDE. I'm very tired of waiting for record classes to show up and I could have written a (to be clear: inferior ) set of stuff around regular classes that magics one into "everything is readonly and we autogenerate a `copy` method", much like Kotlin does for its data classes...but my IDE isn't gonna understand it unless I d…
I still can't believe more people aren't leveraging the Roslyn APIs to write compiler extensions or additional tools around C#. It's conceptually powerful.
At some point I wrote a barebones scripting system using roslyn for a project of mine. At runtime I got a piece of code compiled to a DLL in memory and then executed this DLL; Worked well; But at that time there was no support for destroying AppDomains or something, don't remember the exact name. Still pretty fun; But yeah, there's no real complete documentation anywhere; And the DLL hell was real. Dozens of DLL's ju…
I still can't believe more people aren't leveraging the Roslyn APIs to write compiler extensions or additional tools around C#. It's conceptually powerful.
I looked at bit when I was in preview. It’s indeed powerful but also quite verbose and it distinguish between a lot of concepts, so there is a steep learning curve. Then there was the lack of examples beyond a few blog posts.
I still can't believe more people aren't leveraging the Roslyn APIs to write compiler extensions or additional tools around C#. It's conceptually powerful.
At some point I wrote a barebones scripting system using roslyn for a project of mine. At runtime I got a piece of code compiled to a DLL in memory and then executed this DLL; Worked well; But at that time there was no support for destroying AppDomains or something, don't remember the exact name. Still pretty fun; But yeah, there's no real complete documentation anywhere; And the DLL hell was real. Dozens of DLL's ju…
It's entirely possible that I just don't know what I'm doing well enough to do this correctly, but I just couldn't get it to do the kinds of things that I wanted from it. My sense is that it is really great for injecting custom code that is used rather infrequently. I've had good results using it for building out reporting systems that are pluggable.
I still can't believe more people aren't leveraging the Roslyn APIs to write compiler extensions or additional tools around C#. It's conceptually powerful.
At some point I wrote a barebones scripting system using roslyn for a project of mine. At runtime I got a piece of code compiled to a DLL in memory and then executed this DLL; Worked well; But at that time there was no support for destroying AppDomains or something, don't remember the exact name. Still pretty fun; But yeah, there's no real complete documentation anywhere; And the DLL hell was real. Dozens of DLL's ju…
Why isn't the native code compiler also now written in C#, like Java is doing?
There's an old saying (from one of Unity's developers, I think?) that you can't run Hello World in C# or Java without an XML parser because so much configuration for things like locales ends up pulling in serialization libraries, reflection, etc. Things have improved in this area for both platforms but it's definitely still very difficult to trim managed code down as far as you can trim native code.
For something as critical as the JIT you also want to keep the generated code small (for cache efficiency) and if possible, PGO it - things that existing managed code generators aren't especially great at compared to clang or modern MSVC.
From my past experience writing/maintaining C# compiler and runtime code, I would never bother trying to port the JIT to C#. I don't think the returns are worth the massive investment. I'd sooner port it to a language like Rust for safety benefits or to some sort of hypothetical language that enables producing smaller/faster code to improve JIT performance. I'm not sure I'd invest in that either though because for most workloads JIT time is not the bottleneck (and you can optimize that out in many cases by pre-generating the JITcode). EDIT: Also, for workloads where JIT is the bottleneck, it's questionable whether it's possible to extract big gains out of optimizing the JIT because of the nature of JIT workloads - you may just be bottlenecked on memory bandwidth or instructions per clock. A JIT converting IR to machine code is not trivially vectorized.
People are figuring this out (again, from scratch) now with webassembly as all the modern browsers go through the churn and angst involved in answering the question 'can we actually JIT this whole 50mb executable from scratch at load time?' even though we already knew the answer back when WebAssembly wasn't a spec yet.
[DISCLOSURE: I get paid to work on Mono right now and was paid to help draft the initial WebAssembly spec, and before that my work on the JSIL MSIL->JS compiler was sponsored. So I have some massive biases here.]
Earlier quoted context omitted.
At some point I wrote a barebones scripting system using roslyn for a project of mine. At runtime I got a piece of code compiled to a DLL in memory and then executed this DLL; Worked well; But at that time there was no support for destroying AppDomains or something, don't remember the exact name. Still pretty fun; But yeah, there's no real complete documentation anywhere; And the DLL hell was real. Dozens of DLL's ju…
Roslyn is very powerful, but it is still pretty cumbersome. At one point I spent quite a while trying to get a game scripting system akin to the way that Lua is commonly used working, and I just couldn't get it working fast enough to be viable. I essentially wanted to have a core C# engine that provided services, and then have it call an initialization function and a gameloop function that were defined in designated…
I feel defensive about calling it cumbersome though, and I can't imagine why something like your LUA vision isn't possible (though, I've never tried I just assumed someone would inevitably do this). For example, if World of Warcraft were to switch out their UI LUA extension system with C# I could totally imagine this being possible (though it'd be suicidal for their mod community). Likewise, if Unity were to begin using it for this kind of thing (if they don't already) I'd imagine it is possible.