121–130 of 459 posts
They also announced as part of this that they are putting a large swatch of their .NET Source code under Apache 2 and accepting pull requests. Folks, this is a very big deal for Microsoft. Who would have imagined this 10 years ago? Here is an image that shows what they are putting into the community https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BkT9oBcCQAAHIAV.jpg:large
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Is Mono able to compile Roslyn?
I assume you mean the Mono C# compiler (the one that the Mono team develops). Interestingly, no -- but neither can the native C# compiler (that's what we call the old C# compiler that everyone's using in VS right now)! Why? The C# compiler is bootstrapped, so we actually compile the compiler with the compiler. It just so happens that a while ago we felt we needed a feature so badly for the C# compiler that we introdu…
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Once again the whole KILL MONO FUD was the actions of the Open Source Community in the last 5 years. I never understood how in the world they got this is a trap from everything that was happening. I don't agree with RMS many times but in this one way he was 100% wrong when he targeted mono.
You honestly don't get it? I really like microsoft products and I use them every day, however the business model is too lock people in to their ecosystem so that you have to purchase licenses for their products. Mono clearly undermines that b/c it allows you to "easily" jump ship to a free platform. Unless I'm somehow completely misunderstanding their business model - killing Mono just makes business sense.
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Once again the whole KILL MONO FUD was the actions of the Open Source Community in the last 5 years. I never understood how in the world they got this is a trap from everything that was happening. I don't agree with RMS many times but in this one way he was 100% wrong when he targeted mono.
You honestly don't get it? I really like microsoft products and I use them every day, however the business model is too lock people in to their ecosystem so that you have to purchase licenses for their products. Mono clearly undermines that b/c it allows you to "easily" jump ship to a free platform. Unless I'm somehow completely misunderstanding their business model - killing Mono just makes business sense.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Once again the whole KILL MONO FUD was the actions of the Open Source Community in the last 5 years. I never understood how in the world they got this is a trap from everything that was happening. I don't agree with RMS many times but in this one way he was 100% wrong when he targeted mono.
You honestly don't get it? I really like microsoft products and I use them every day, however the business model is too lock people in to their ecosystem so that you have to purchase licenses for their products. Mono clearly undermines that b/c it allows you to "easily" jump ship to a free platform. Unless I'm somehow completely misunderstanding their business model - killing Mono just makes business sense.
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The C# compiler is written in C#, so you can use it anywhere with a .NET runtime. Microsoft doesn't ship a .NET runtime for Linux, so you'll have to use Mono, but if your app is compatible with Mono, you're good to go!
How does something like this happen? How can you write a compiler in the language that it is supposed to be compiling?
Some other interesting contemporary examples:
I think as we speak Go is working on its plan to switch from using a compiler written in Go[2].
Rust[3] has kind of a hybrid approach where the front-end of the compiler is written in rust, but generates llvm bytecode which is then compiled the rest of the way by llvm itself. It takes three "stages" for them to do a full compile, first a binary "snapshot" compiler is downloaded and used to compile the compiler (stage 0), then that generated compiler is used to compile the compiler again (stage 1), and then that generated compiler is used to compile the compiler again (stage 2). Stage 2 is actually just a test - its output should be identical to that of stage 1, and if it isn't, something went wrong.
There is a classic lecture from Ken Thompson[4] that I think is really illuminating on how this stuff works, if you're unfamiliar with it.
It's really fascinating stuff!
[1]: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/edmund.grimley-evans/bcompiler.... [2]: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1P3BLR31VA8cvLJLfMibSuTdw... [3]: http://www.rust-lang.org/ [4]: http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html
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I'm not sure whether there ever was a time when .NET devs had to seriously consider "what was happening in the background". .NET Framework documentation has always been pretty good. Not too many dark corners there.
Not a .NET dev myself, but I believe Android's documentation is also pretty good. Nevertheless, I can distinctly recall instances when looking at Android's source was necessary/helpful.
Generally I've not been very impressed with the quality of Android's documentation and firmly believe a company such as Google can do better. And after having a look at the process around getting a patch approved I deemed it not worth my time trying to contribute documentation fixes and enhancements.
Everyone on Roslyn is really excited about this and we hope that it serves as a signal that big things are happening in .NET to make the entire platform more open and agile! P.S. We're the Visual Basic compiler too :)
What's the likelihood the .NET VM is open sourced as well? I use Mono right now to run my apps on Linux but it would be great to use the official implementation since Mono has subtle differences.
If Microsoft starts working on its own Unity-clone, with a functional language, advanced concurrency features, and good incremental GC, they could be sure to capture a big chunk of the mindshare of game developers. This could then be parlayed into mindshare of soft-realtime development, which will become ever more important.
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Who would have imagined it five months ago?
yulaow, clearly the lead-time on a lot of this stuff is longer than Ballmer's been gone, so yeah, not fair to put all this on his departure. "Five months" was a pithy play off "five years," nothing more or less than that.