How would you compare special features, if any, as well as advantages (and disadvantages) of using C# for developing an embedded DSL versus using Julia macros for the same purpose versus using specialized toolsets (e.g., MPS) for developing an external DSL? Please note that I'm aware of the Modeling SDK for Visual Studio. However, since it only allows integration with / targets the Visual Studio environment, it is not a good general approach, hence the question.
How Microsoft rewrote its C# compiler in C# and made it open source (2017)
101–110 of 136 posts
Re: How Microsoft rewrote its C# compiler in C# and made it open source (2017)
#102While the rewrite enabled faster development of the language as a whole, it also gradually destroyed the IDE's performance. The editor in VS 2019 is simply unworkable. I blame this directly on the immutable AST. While a nice concept in theory, it causes too many allocations, and is cumbersome to work with. I predict another rewrite in 2 or 3 years.
Visual Studio is 32-bit and limited to about 3.5GB of RAM. The increasing functionality and solution sizes create bottlenecks in the processing.
This is a fundamental problem that for various (outdated and bad) reasons the team hasn't fixed. They've been refactoring components to run in separate processes but it's slow progress and still won't solve the main thread running out of memory anyway.
Re: How Microsoft rewrote its C# compiler in C# and made it open source (2017)
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
Their intent is still entirely market share. We need to be vigilant on how they get there. History has taught us a lot of lessons we seem to have forgotten because shiny and new layer of marketing. There is still a massive cultural and technical impedance mismatch.
Given the new mission statement of Microsoft, I think if the community is more vocal about the things they want to accomplish it will become imperative that people at the company will be assigned to making those desiderata a reality. So if you want more visual tooling, find a way to become more vocal about it. If you want more support for this or that tech fad, make it known.
The community have been very vocal on a number of issues and thoroughly ignored and steamrolled over. Or the direction changes once the desired outcome is established.
Re: How Microsoft rewrote its C# compiler in C# and made it open source (2017)
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
Their intent is still entirely market share. We need to be vigilant on how they get there. History has taught us a lot of lessons we seem to have forgotten because shiny and new layer of marketing. There is still a massive cultural and technical impedance mismatch.
> Their intent is still entirely market share. So like essentially all other corporations?
Precisely.
Re: How Microsoft rewrote its C# compiler in C# and made it open source (2017)
#105I've always loved C# but can't quite get past having to target specific .net frameworks and keeping the different frameworks in my different servers straight and targeting each of them differently. Maybe that'll change with .net core (and once I'm able to get that on my servers), but for now I've discovered a personal love for Go as a way around this for my small utilities.
.net core apps can be published as standalone. Requiring no installation of any framework
Re: How Microsoft rewrote its C# compiler in C# and made it open source (2017)
#106Why isn't the native code compiler also now written in C#, like Java is doing?
People have done research before into having the C#->native JIT be written in C#, I recall seeing prototypes. There are a ton of barriers between a prototype and a shipping implementation though, so I'm not sure we'll ever see it. In particular you risk regressions in startup time or memory usage since the amount of infrastructure needed to run C# (pre-jitted?) to generate all your jitcode is much higher than a small…
The way Java does it is their JIT written in Java is optionally AOT compiled to native code, so it doesn't have a startup time or warmup time problem and it can be PGOd.
We do know that the returns are worth it, because people are able to develop new optimisations in the Java version that people just won't attempt in the C++ version because the code is so much harder to work with (but possibly just due to the age of the C++ version) and its achieving 13% speedup over the C++ version in practice at places like Twitter, which is worth millions of dollars.
Re: How Microsoft rewrote its C# compiler in C# and made it open source (2017)
#107While the rewrite enabled faster development of the language as a whole, it also gradually destroyed the IDE's performance. The editor in VS 2019 is simply unworkable. I blame this directly on the immutable AST. While a nice concept in theory, it causes too many allocations, and is cumbersome to work with. I predict another rewrite in 2 or 3 years.
I never had any issues with it, I guess because I keep myself away from JetBrains products as much as possible (have to endure them on Android).
Re: How Microsoft rewrote its C# compiler in C# and made it open source (2017)
#108While the rewrite enabled faster development of the language as a whole, it also gradually destroyed the IDE's performance. The editor in VS 2019 is simply unworkable. I blame this directly on the immutable AST. While a nice concept in theory, it causes too many allocations, and is cumbersome to work with. I predict another rewrite in 2 or 3 years.
I found that VS 2019 is faster than VS 2017. But VS 2019 with Resharper is a lot more slower than VS 2017 with resharper. I would blame resharper there, not VS. VS never felt that fast than right now.
Every VS release is one reason less to use Resharper.
Re: How Microsoft rewrote its C# compiler in C# and made it open source (2017)
#109While the rewrite enabled faster development of the language as a whole, it also gradually destroyed the IDE's performance. The editor in VS 2019 is simply unworkable. I blame this directly on the immutable AST. While a nice concept in theory, it causes too many allocations, and is cumbersome to work with. I predict another rewrite in 2 or 3 years.
They kind of are already rewriting it, with VSCode + OmniSharp.
VS Code is like 50% of VS capabilities.
Re: How Microsoft rewrote its C# compiler in C# and made it open source (2017)
#110I 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.
Their intent is still entirely market share. We need to be vigilant on how they get there. History has taught us a lot of lessons we seem to have forgotten because shiny and new layer of marketing. There is still a massive cultural and technical impedance mismatch.
On the other hand, a company just has to come out with propaganda like "Do no evil" and everyone rails behind them.