CoreCLR is now open source • Hacker News Board

Re: CoreCLR is now open source

#231

Post by dragonshed » Wed, Feb 04, 2015, 4:16 AM UTC

otakucode wrote: post #229

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.

Unfortunately, Ballmer's managerial approach is what killed it. He might have known that helping developers was the way to go, but he also thought that competition in the organization would lead to better performance. My understanding is that this idea failed in some of the most vicious and destructive ways possible. I hope that the very visible failure of his cut-throat management style and setting up so many disinc…

Indeed. I'm reminded of this org chart comparison... http://www.bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts/

Re: CoreCLR is now open source

#232

Post by otakucode » Wed, Feb 04, 2015, 4:17 AM UTC

brudgers wrote: post #201

scrollaway wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 legac…

So far as I am aware, ALL usable operating systems are burdened with that sort of thing. I'd really like to see someone at least attempt a clean-slate OS. Make it 64-bit only from the start, vector fonts to support HighDPI displays from the beginning, etc. It would likely accumulate such cruft over time, but I would expect there to be substantial advantages to building from scratch something that rolls in all of the research advances and assumes capable modern hardware.

Re: CoreCLR is now open source

#233

Post by Cyph0n » Wed, Feb 04, 2015, 4:25 AM UTC

larsberg wrote: post #176

ploxiln wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

github suppresses views of syntax-highlighted files that have too many lines or too-long lines. They make browsers crawl or crash (too many elements...) and they're not useful for humans to try to view on a web page anyway. I guess it's no surprise that microsoft software has a human-edited source file that's over 35000 lines...

> I guess it's no surprise that microsoft software has a human-edited source file that's over 35000 lines... IIRC, it was originally machine-generated... from LISP code written by David Bacon, under contract from the then-GC owner Patrick Dussud.

I'm sorry, what? That sounds awesome.

Re: CoreCLR is now open source

#234

Post by otakucode » Wed, Feb 04, 2015, 4:28 AM UTC

aninteger wrote: post #98

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…

It's certainly not "official" but we already have Wine and Mono. I understand that they don't promise write once run anywhere but the support is pretty good. For awhile it was one of the only ways to get Netflix working on Linux based platforms.

.Net actually promises a bit more 'write once run anywhere' than Java. Java stuff is not, and does not seek to be, binary compatible across platforms. .Net is. I'd really love to see, once .Net is all open, browser makers to throw the CLR into the browser. Overnight it would release us from the tyranny of js and let us use basically any language we ever want.

Re: CoreCLR is now open source

#235

Post by lobster_johnson » Wed, Feb 04, 2015, 4:47 AM UTC

mackwic wrote: post #107

bigdubs wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Device drivers can be divorced from the core os.

They are divorced from the core os. Windows is a microkernel and the drivers run in userland since vista. It's a completely different matters.

The NT kernel is not a microkernel. It all runs in ring 0, including device drivers: I/O, graphics, HID, file systems, etc. It's modular, but there is no protection between the various parts, which all run in a single kernel process, with a single address space.

The NT kernel is sometimes called a _hybrid_ microkernel, but this refers only to the fact that the internal modules are logically decoupled (with message passing between them, for example). Also, graphics actually used to run in userland until they moved it into the kernel for Windows 2000.

Re: CoreCLR is now open source

#236

Post by stingraycharles » Wed, Feb 04, 2015, 4:52 AM UTC

rdtsc wrote: post #213

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.

When it comes to propaganda from large and powerful entities, usually it help to reverse the meaning to really understand the message. "Developers,developers,developer" = Fuck developers,need more profits next quarter. "We brought peace and democracy to country " = We seriously fucked it up for years to come, and installed a brutal puppet dictator. "We are not evil like those other mean companies. We will do good in…

It's not only from organizations and powerful entities, I like to apply this logic in normal day-to-day communications with people too.

If someone has a very strong opinion about something and tries to "convert" everyone to it (say, vegetarianism, meditation, emacs, or whatever), it is usually because someone is very insecure about him/herself this trait, and made it part of their identity. It usually has no point discussing this with a person like that.

Re: CoreCLR is now open source

#237

Post by logn » Wed, Feb 04, 2015, 4:54 AM UTC

zanny wrote: post #221

yellowapple wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 certa…

MySQL got worked into MariaDB. Don't think many people are recommending you use the Oracle version much anymore. And Oracle Java has also died on every platform that is not Windows. OpenJDK took over the Unix space, and Google has Dalvik and the ART implementing the JRE. Virtualbox still exists. I guess. It has not done anything in about half a decade, though.

OpenJDK is unofficially ported and built for numerous platforms. But OpenJDK is Oracle's JDK. To contribute to it, you sign Oracle's contributor's license agreement.

Oracle's no golden example as a leader in open source (let alone libre software), but they demonstrate the probable trajectory for the Microsoft projects at this point: a healthy, cohesive community of developers (developers!) using the technology in an ever increasing number of projects and platforms.

Re: CoreCLR is now open source

#238

Post by ossreality » Wed, Feb 04, 2015, 5:01 AM UTC

brz wrote: post #156

adrianlmm wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Those people would probably have to buy Windows and VisualStudio licenses to code in C# in a VM or just ditch Macs for PCs. No, they can code in Linux using Vim if they want.

They can also walk on broken glass with bare feet.

This is pretty ignorant. Omnisharp + vim/emacs + ASP.NET 5 is a very clearly supported scenario by the ASP.NET team.

In fact, you'll find David Fowler advocating for emacs and Omnisharp's good-ness.

But yay for pithiness, amiright

Re: CoreCLR is now open source

#239

Post by fsloth » Wed, Feb 04, 2015, 5:10 AM UTC

jaked89 wrote: post #109

fsloth wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. It might appear a bit clunky at first sight, and it might not provide the shiniest eye candy out of the box but in terms of development velocity to get something practical done - provided it is combined with the tooling in Visual Studio - it's really nice.

Velocity? Only for simple, boring UI. Any non-standard control requires GDI+ rendering, which is not very maintainable. WPF offers a far superior composition ability.

I agree I would not suggest doing anything non-standard with it. And yes, it looks dated and ugly. But in some places visual appearance of widgets is not that important.

Often, boring UI:s are good. The tool should fade into the background and let the user focus on getting her work done.

While I love shiny things the real world accepts good enough solutions that are economic to develop.

Theoretically I just adore WPF:s scenegraph oriented paradigm since it feels the right way but... I've observed that for a large projects practically it needs a lot of work to get anything usefull done compared to forms. Perhaps the overall architecture is a bit big-org oriented where every tiny widget will have its own development team. Which is understandable but means for simple UI:s WPF might be a lot more expensive. I haven't done anything massive with it myself but have just observed a few projects from my work. I hope there are counterexamples.

Re: CoreCLR is now open source

#240

Post by throwawaykf05 » Wed, Feb 04, 2015, 5:14 AM UTC

rdtsc wrote: post #213

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.

When it comes to propaganda from large and powerful entities, usually it help to reverse the meaning to really understand the message. "Developers,developers,developer" = Fuck developers,need more profits next quarter. "We brought peace and democracy to country " = We seriously fucked it up for years to come, and installed a brutal puppet dictator. "We are not evil like those other mean companies. We will do good in…

Except I don't think this is true of Ballmer when it came to "developers, developers, developers". I doubt Microsoft has willingly done anything to harm developers that use its products, certainly not for "profits next quarter". Sure, they deprecated some technologies (like Silverlight), but that was in response to market realities (like the iPhone and HTML5), and even then they are supported for years. All the various complaints lodged against Microsoft, such as Spolsky's "fire and motion", are more rationally explained by the vagaries of how technologies progress organically in large companies and in the industry in general.