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Microsoft Open Sources C# Compiler

roslyn.codeplex.com

131–140 of 459 posts

Re: Microsoft Open Sources C# Compiler

#131
post #83

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

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.

Are you referring to this? It doesn't sound like he was trying to kill Mono, he just didn't want to depend on it because of the patent issue.

https://www.fsf.org/news/dont-depend-on-mono

So, five years later Microsoft makes another step in the right direction, and you think he's wrong because he didn't want to risk building the open source environment around something that could go away with a simple threat.

Btw, doesn't Microsoft make more money from Android patents than Microsoft phones? Microsoft does exercise their patents.

Re: Microsoft Open Sources C# Compiler

#132
post #102

I think we're all very lucky to have a corporation as innovative, open-minded, and generous as Microsoft. Microsoft is a company that every company should look up to.

This does not make up for decades of abuse they've been giving the market at large. Yes, I've witnessed it first hand as early as 1990, and second hand ever since. They're still extorting android handset makers, and it was only 5 years ago that they loaded the ISO committees to favor OOXML.

Re: Microsoft Open Sources C# Compiler

#133
This is just the beginning. While I hate their business model and corporate mindset, Microsoft has really well thought out products that can easily make an impact outside their ecosystem. I'm glad they are realising this, and %100 sure there will be more coming from this direction.

Re: Microsoft Open Sources C# Compiler

#134
post #121

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

signs of the new Satya Nadella era?

All this started long ago. Roslyn has been in development for a few years and that was still under Ballmer's leadership. Also many of the other things they're unveiling and open-sourcing now started way before Nadella took over as CEO.

But my guess would be that Ballmer stepping down was sort of symbolic in this regard. With a new CEO it looks more like a "new Microsoft" doing all these things.

Re: Microsoft Open Sources C# Compiler

#135
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think you misunderstood the parent. They are talking about the open source community and RMS, not Microsoft trying to kill Mono.

I guess I left out the obvious connection.

It's all part of the same thinking. RMS et al think - not unreasonably - think that this is Microsoft's business plan, so they really don't want the open source community investing their time on a platform they think will get clamped down to work only on a proprietary system.

Re: Microsoft Open Sources C# Compiler

#136
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... as awesome as this is, I'm gonna be That Guy: No WPF?

WPF just got some love a few minutes ago - they've got plans for a new release of it by the sound of things.

WPF is alive and kicking. I'll just leave this here... https://careers.microsoft.com/jobdetails.aspx?jid=137020&pp=...

Re: Microsoft Open Sources C# Compiler

#137
post #111
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought WPF was killed during the whole mess of killing Silverlight, etc. a few years back?

No WPF is still there. XAML is still the basis for windows store apps, and windows phone apps.

XAML != WPF. XAML is a language for object instantiation, thats it. Similar to XIBs in the Apple world.

There are no less than 3 similar but different and incompatible UI libraries that can be instantiated by XAML: WPF, Silverlight (WPF/e), and Windows store/phone (WinRT). WPF is dead like WinForms but the only solution for normal windows apps unless somethings changed with WinRT to make non full screen apps with.

If you have ever tried to develop across more than one of these with a shared code base you will know how frustratingly similar yet how incompatible and different they are. They are not supersets or subsets they are forks.

Re: Microsoft Open Sources C# Compiler

#138
post #130
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Does it really take that long to make a decision to open source something? Perhaps for a large company it does, I dunno. The projects themselves may have been in development for a long time (this is definitely true of Roslyn), but that doesn't mean they were always going to be open sourced.

They announced a Foundation with members outside of Microsoft, in charge of a mix of their code and code from Xamarin. So you need to coordinate all of that. You also probably need to have lawyers review all the code and make sure that MS has the rights to everything included so they can do this, someone to scrub all the comments to make sure developers didn't throw in something embarrassing or worse, you need to set up workflows for reviewing community bug reports and patches... this isn't something you can do in an afternoon.

Re: Microsoft Open Sources C# Compiler

#139
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Heh.

A few years ago I was on a small team working on a .NET compiler and runtime -- it compiled MSIL into native code targeting x86 and PowerPC. I remember when working on the part of the compiler that built the exception handling routines running into exception filters and wondering what they were for. We were largely targeting C# as a development environment at the time but ended up implementing them in case anyone wanted to use VB.NET. Funny to see that they're now making their way back into C#, even if it's just in the compiler :)

Re: Microsoft Open Sources C# Compiler

#140
post #19

As a C# developer who genuinely likes the C# language (although I loathe vast swaths of the .NET framework libs) I'm actually super-excited about this. C# is a great language, and I hope to see it flourish outside of the MS walled garden. Miguel de Icaza does what he can with Mono, but it can be so much more.

Agreed. I really like C#. But it's currently pretty close to useless anywhere other than Windows - Mono doesn't even come close. Hopefully this will close the gap.

Depending on what you are doing, Mono has come very far. The new GC is in and a lot of optimizations have been made. Ubuntu 14 will ship with 3.2.8 I believe which has all the goodies. Apparently the performance is still poor for web development but it works well for daemons/desktop apps. You're probably better starting off with a tech that is cross platform out of the box instead of relying on Mono but if you have an existing C# project then Mono is awesome.
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