CoreCLR is now open source • Hacker News Board

Re: CoreCLR is now open source

#201

Post by brudgers » Wed, Feb 04, 2015, 1:28 AM UTC

scrollaway wrote: post #171

brudgers wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good debugging tools that filter out the irrelevant are perhaps better. Odds are that any time you break out the debugger the fix is in your code not Windows, Linux, the JVM etc. That's not to say those things don't have bugs, only that they are orders if magnitude more debugged than most code under development.

You are so completely wrong. Follow the Wine project for a few weeks/months to get familiar with just how buggy, inconsistent and inconceivably obscure all of Windows' APIs are. If Windows was good and near-bug-free, Wine would have long been completed. Windows is not just its kernel.

Wine has to duplicate all of the duct tape and bailing wire Microsoft has used to provide backwards compatibility for their customers' existing applications. Just as Wine is an important kludge serving as a compatibility layer [It's Not an Emulator], all those undocumented API's are the same sort of kludge as compatibility layer.

And of course Wine is an outlier. Not only in that it contains its own 20 years of legacy code but in the fact that it is black box reverse engineering. It can't use disassembly to suss out details. Wine's difficulties stem from its requirements as much as anything else. These days VM's are the way to go if the going is intended to get things done. A Windows box in the cloud is pennies per hour.

Re: CoreCLR is now open source

#202

Post by yellowapple » Wed, Feb 04, 2015, 1:36 AM UTC

logn wrote: post #190

WorldWideWayne wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see why everything needs to be open source. People who simply don't like Microsoft will not use it just because it's open. Quite the opposite I think - they'd probably immediately fork it and provide an alternate download in order to hurt Microsoft. Are foreign governments a big market that Microsoft has lost a lot of customers from? I don't think so. The vast majority of the potential market for Windows is a…

How would that hurt Microsoft? There aren't many people who have bought MS software for years and are now excited to use a fork or their own build. Even assuming that some other mega corp comes along and offers world class support/service and their own fork, it still probably wouldn't hurt MS much. Most small companies would have released their code as GPL (versus MIT as the case here) to limit the risk of a fork fra…

> Oracle

Er, no.

The entirety of Oracle's dabbling in "open source" has been by shaking free software products out of the rotting carcass of Sun Microsystems and - in many cases - adding those products to the grave (see also: OpenSolaris, OpenOffice, various others). The exceptions - namely MySQL (which wasn't a Sun product) and Java (which is still doing reasonably well) - are few and far between.

Oracle Linux certainly exists, but I'm certainly not about to hold that monstrosity on any sort of pedestal.

As for the others, yeah, they're making money on FOSS (and not killing said FOSS in the process), though such free software tends to be integrated in very much proprietary end results (like OS X / iOS and the vast majority of Android distributions).

Re: CoreCLR is now open source

#203

Post by eropple » Wed, Feb 04, 2015, 1:37 AM UTC

JetSpiegel wrote: post #197

brudgers wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think open source is great and I even admire Stallman because of not despite his single mindedness. I also don't think Windows being closed source is problematic. Choice is good and Windows is able to solve a particular set of problems efficiently by virtue of Microsoft's business model. That model fit my needs and interests for many years. Less so now because my needs and interests have changed to where the tradeo…

What kind of "choice" exists between open and closed source? Everything you can do with closed source software you can also do with open, and there are things you can't do with closed source.

The choice is "sometimes I don't want to distribute my code."

You can use it, or you can not.

Re: CoreCLR is now open source

#204

Post by porges » Wed, Feb 04, 2015, 1:39 AM UTC

DoggettCK wrote: post #96

munificent wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably because it's not worth the memory hit to store the hash.

That was my assumption, too. They do memoize the length, but I'm sure those bytes add up, having run into OutOfMemoryExceptions building huge amounts of strings before.

You have to store the length, C# strings can contain '\0' (although the hashing code doesn't take this into account!)

Re: CoreCLR is now open source

#205

Post by jsprogrammer » Wed, Feb 04, 2015, 1:39 AM UTC

WorldWideWayne wrote: post #123

Nelkins wrote: post #48

I would be curious to see the effects of completely open-sourcing Windows. Businesses would continue to use it, because it's Microsoft and they want enterprise support. I think it would get even more love than it already does from the development community. Piracy of Windows is already rampant, so they're not really in a worse position from that (plus I think that most people who can pay for Windows do so already). F…

I don't see why everything needs to be open source. People who simply don't like Microsoft will not use it just because it's open. Quite the opposite I think - they'd probably immediately fork it and provide an alternate download in order to hurt Microsoft. Are foreign governments a big market that Microsoft has lost a lot of customers from? I don't think so. The vast majority of the potential market for Windows is a…

>I don't see why everything needs to be open source.

I think this goes back to one of the core tenets of free and/or open source software: the user should be able to know, control, and modify exactly what their machine is doing.

If the source is not available you're just running a black box and praying that it will do what the person who gave it to you claims it will do.

Re: CoreCLR is now open source

#206

Post by yellowapple » Wed, Feb 04, 2015, 1:40 AM UTC

WorldWideWayne wrote: post #123

Nelkins wrote: post #48

I would be curious to see the effects of completely open-sourcing Windows. Businesses would continue to use it, because it's Microsoft and they want enterprise support. I think it would get even more love than it already does from the development community. Piracy of Windows is already rampant, so they're not really in a worse position from that (plus I think that most people who can pay for Windows do so already). F…

I don't see why everything needs to be open source. People who simply don't like Microsoft will not use it just because it's open. Quite the opposite I think - they'd probably immediately fork it and provide an alternate download in order to hurt Microsoft. Are foreign governments a big market that Microsoft has lost a lot of customers from? I don't think so. The vast majority of the potential market for Windows is a…

> People who simply don't like Microsoft will not use it just because it's open.

You're forgetting that a lot of people traditionally haven't liked Microsoft because their software wasn't/isn't open. Yeah, Windows would still be a steaming pile of bovine manure regardless of which license it was made available under, but the availability of that source code would make it easy for better, Unix-like operating systems to pick up the necessary pieces to support Windows software, thus continuing to allow Microsoft to profit on their non-operating-system software (Office, SQL Server, Exchange, IIS, Internet Explorer^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HSpartan, etc.) regardless of whether or not Windows itself is widespread in usage.

Re: CoreCLR is now open source

#207

Post by brudgers » Wed, Feb 04, 2015, 1:43 AM UTC

JetSpiegel wrote: post #197

brudgers wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think open source is great and I even admire Stallman because of not despite his single mindedness. I also don't think Windows being closed source is problematic. Choice is good and Windows is able to solve a particular set of problems efficiently by virtue of Microsoft's business model. That model fit my needs and interests for many years. Less so now because my needs and interests have changed to where the tradeo…

What kind of "choice" exists between open and closed source? Everything you can do with closed source software you can also do with open, and there are things you can't do with closed source.

A closed source project can license closed source technology and save development costs while avoiding putting 1.0 code for an edge case into their core product. The exchange of money helps keep the interest in support, maintenance, and extension by those who first developed the technology.

Re: CoreCLR is now open source

#208

Post by yellowapple » Wed, Feb 04, 2015, 1:47 AM UTC

smacktoward wrote: post #124

pmontra wrote: post #117

I wonder how this strategy is going to affect the bottom line of Microsoft. People writing with CLR languages are deploying web apps mainly (or only) to Windows now. They're going to have an option to deploy to Linux soon. This means less revenues from OS and DB licenses, so it looks bad. Do they expect a large number of people leaving Java, Node, Python, Ruby and picking up C# because of the Linux deploys? Those peo…

> Or maybe they're playing a longer game: open source as much as they can, hope some network effect builds up, find out how to profit from it. That was Sun's strategy for Java; it didn't work out well for them. Java became huge, but Sun never did figure out how to make a dollar from it.

There were some potential solutions (like billing SPARC servers and workstations as "Java development/deployment platforms") that Sun started to brush against, but they ran out of time / money / distance from Oracle's sidaM Touch, etc.

Re: CoreCLR is now open source

#209

Post by JetSpiegel » Wed, Feb 04, 2015, 1:50 AM UTC

brudgers wrote: post #207

JetSpiegel wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of "choice" exists between open and closed source? Everything you can do with closed source software you can also do with open, and there are things you can't do with closed source.

A closed source project can license closed source technology and save development costs while avoiding putting 1.0 code for an edge case into their core product. The exchange of money helps keep the interest in support, maintenance, and extension by those who first developed the technology.

Open source projects can also release v1.0 with bugs, it's not like there is some Open Source Police stopping you from doing that. You can also pay for support of open source software, and that benefits everyone and not just the company that happened to have money to invest in it.

Re: CoreCLR is now open source

#210

Post by brudgers » Wed, Feb 04, 2015, 1:55 AM UTC

scrollaway wrote: post #172

doodpants wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> De-Ballmerization and Microsoft is oozing delicious developer love. Kind of ironic, what with Ballmer's "Developers developers developers..." spiel.

Indeed. For someone who understood the problem, Ballmer sure missed out on understanding the solution.

Ballmer set Microsoft on this course years ago. This is his legacy. Billions in the bank probably make up for lack of credit from the peanut gallery who think radical shifts in direction happen overnight.

He laid the foundation before he and Gates started selling their stock. The new Microsoft is beholden to Wall Street. It can't do an Xbox360 or Windows Phone or buy a Nokia. Ten years of Open Source projects at Microsoft are why analysts aren't calling for scalps. Ballmer made the next guys job easier.