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Microsoft Open Sources C# Compiler

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Re: Microsoft Open Sources C# Compiler

#281
Really confused about the Xamarin/MSFT situation. I see Miguel everywhere on Build, and other MS teams casually mentioning cooperations with Xamarin.

Certainly Microsoft wouldn't mind just throwing some millions at them and buying them outright, so are we to deduce that any such offer was rejected?

Re: Microsoft Open Sources C# Compiler

#282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We regularly dogfood, so we're on like N iterations of your structure, but that's the idea!

Could you ask around the office and find out some of the details about the C# bootstrap process? I would be fascinated to know what language the non-C# compiler was written in and also how long they used/improved the non-C# compiler until they switched to the C# compiler. This source release is so cool!

Oh, the old compiler is just the currently shipping compiler (i.e., the one in a clean install of VS 2013). We've been using and maintaining it since the beginning. It's written in C++, so we refer to it as the "native compiler."

We only stopped bootstrapping using the native compiler about, oh, 6 months ago, since that was when we decided to take a dependency on new language features. The next VS will be the first VS where Roslyn is the default C# compiler.

Re: Microsoft Open Sources C# Compiler

#283

Really confused about the Xamarin/MSFT situation. I see Miguel everywhere on Build, and other MS teams casually mentioning cooperations with Xamarin. Certainly Microsoft wouldn't mind just throwing some millions at them and buying them outright, so are we to deduce that any such offer was rejected?

Or we are to dedude that Microsoft didn't want to make such an offer, because while they want to spread .NET into a cross-platform standard, they still prefer a third party like Xamarin to deal with iOS, Linux and the like support for .NET (perhaps for public perception reasons).

Re: Microsoft Open Sources C# Compiler

#284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having followed a fair number of MS bloggers/podcasts currently in and around their web tools (ASP.NET, MVC, etc) teams... I honestly believe they understand the value of open source. Visual Studio and their MVC framework continue to impress me (I mostly work in Ruby today, but have to maintain some .NET stuff) and MS takes inspiration from successful open-source tools and frameworks where needed. Many of their recen…

I think one would be exceedingly foolish not to exercise the very greatest of caution. This is Microsoft we're talking about - they have a track record of profound fuckery. But I do indeed think this is better than not having happened.

>This is Microsoft we're talking about - they have a track record of profound fuckery.

Any examples? Besides "bundling IE with the OS and pressuring some OEM vendors back in the nineties"?

Re: Microsoft Open Sources C# Compiler

#285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Visual Studio auto-complete significantly different from IntelliJ or Eclipse? There are many great editors an the continium between gedit and Visual Studio, such as Sublime, hell even vim and emacs have autocomplete plugins.

C# support in IntelliJ would be a dream come true! (yes, I know about ReSharper - but that's just lipstick on a pig)

Pig? VS is considered one of the best IDEs out there. On par, if not better than IntelliJ.

Re: Microsoft Open Sources C# Compiler

#286
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, here we are then. This now officially the standard play for formerly-dominating computer-platform firms who have fallen on hard times: having before been proudly hard-nosed and proprietary, publicly see the light and present a new image as a new, kinder, gentler company which totally gets it about openness. Former famous examples: IBM under Lou Gerstner (we love Linux and open platforms!), Apple after the NeXT…

Subtle difference: Apple and IBM have made use of free software such as FreeBSD, CUPS, Webkit, etc. Microsoft here is taking core technology and releasing it as free.

Correction: Webkit wasn't some software Apple made use of. Apple created Webkit as we know it. What they DID use was KHTML, a far more barebones web rendering engine used in KDE, that Apple adopted, and turned into Webkit. Webkit as Apple had it (before Google stepped in) was an order of magnitude more evolved than KHTML.

Re: Microsoft Open Sources C# Compiler

#287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think one would be exceedingly foolish not to exercise the very greatest of caution. This is Microsoft we're talking about - they have a track record of profound fuckery. But I do indeed think this is better than not having happened.

> This is Microsoft we're talking about - they have a track record of profound fuckery. Any examples? Besides "bundling IE with the OS and pressuring some OEM vendors back in the nineties"?

I would also add that Google, Apple, Facebook and others are hardly without their track records of "profound fuckery"... and yet it's only Microsoft for which the knee-jerk reaction to any bit of news seems to be "it sucks."

Re: Microsoft Open Sources C# Compiler

#288
It's interesting that they made their own lexer/parser for this (cf. Microsoft.CodeAnalysis.CSharp/Parser/LanguageParser.cs). It seems that it has a lot of advanced technologies (e.g. error recovery) here. I'm curious if it's possible to create a more general parser framework out of this.

Re: Microsoft Open Sources C# Compiler

#289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think one would be exceedingly foolish not to exercise the very greatest of caution. This is Microsoft we're talking about - they have a track record of profound fuckery. But I do indeed think this is better than not having happened.

> This is Microsoft we're talking about - they have a track record of profound fuckery. Any examples? Besides "bundling IE with the OS and pressuring some OEM vendors back in the nineties"?

Start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_Documents

Continue here if you feel extraordinarily ambitious: http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=2007021720... (Comes vs. Microsoft)

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