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Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform

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Re: Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform

#821

Post by Dewie »

nbevans wrote: post #683
rastapasta42 wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clearly you have no idea what you're talking about. I suggest first learning the language before spreading FUD about it. Separation of pure and unpure components greatly simplifies the reasoning about the problem domain. Traditional imperative programs are often full of subtle bugs because calling a procedure can have arbitrary effect on your system. For example calling function with the same arguments can return dif…

"But in Haskell pure functions are guaranteed to have same result with same input." I'm pretty sure that same law applies to a pure function in any language, not just Haskell. #shitthatHNsays

What "pure" means varies from language to language.

Re: Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform

#822

Post by bad_user »

Fede_V wrote: post #793

I know this won't convince many hardcore Unix people who are used to the command line, but Visual Studio is still an absolutely incredible piece of software, and I really, really wish I could run it under Linux. Even if you are a command line ninja, amazing autocompletion, magical debugging with inspection are pretty wonderful.

IntelliJ IDEA runs everywhere and is a lot smarter than Visual Studio out of the box. The community edition is not only free of charge, but open-source as well. Visual Studio needs the Resharper plugin by IntelliJ, to be able to call it a modern IDE.

It also has really good plugins for many languages, besides Java, like Scala, Python, Ruby, Javascript, PHP, Clojure and Groovy.

My colleagues that are doing Ruby development are saying that it's the best IDE for Ruby. Whereas myself, as a Scala developer, I'm saying that it's the best IDE for Scala - the Scala plugin for example is still not as smart as the Java functionality, but has everything you'd expect out of an IDE, like amazing autocompletion and magical debugging with inspection - personally I feel that IntelliJ IDEA for Scala is better than Visual Studio for C# without Resharper.

Its only problem is that there's no support for C#. This is because people doing C# are doing it on Windows with Visual Studio, so there wasn't demand. But say that demand increases for cross-platform stuff due to these moves by Microsoft, IntelliJ IDEA will probably gain C# support and if IntelliJ the company is the one that does it, then it's going to be darn good.

So don't get me wrong, but for cross-platform stuff alternatives already exist and even if Microsoft releases Visual Studio cross-platform, problem is that it will have serious competition, plus they'll have to poor serious resources into it and frankly I'm not seeing it happening - IntelliJ IDEA is built in Java and runs on the JVM, hate it or love it, for IntelliJ it is easy to port it to other platforms. Visual Studio on the other hand, well, it probably has very Windows-specific guts. So a cross-platform port probably won't happen.

But what I'm seeing happening is a plugin for IntelliJ IDEA or Eclipse (hopefully IDEA, since it's my favorite). And from what I understood there are things in project Roslyn that IDE authors could use to jump start the nice stuff, like completion or refactoring support.

Re: Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform

#823

Post by bad_user »

room271 wrote: post #815
bad_user wrote: post #568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You shouldn't have read contention with locking in the first place unless it's for a very good reason. True, but you know how it is in practice :-) For example I found that using persistent data-structures work best when you've got single producer, multiple consumers scenarios - so you mutate some state and you want to signal it over asynchronous boundaries to multiple consumers. With an immutable data-structure yo…

> Actually non-blocking logic becomes really easy, as you can always shove an immutable value into an atomic reference (note - I'm not saying "wait free", which still takes a lot of work :)) Why the atomic reference here? I know that provides CAS but if we're talking about a single writer aren't you okay to just replace things anyway?

Yes, I wasn't talking about a single writer. That was a new paragraph. Sorry about not making that clear.

Re: Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform

#824

Post by icc97 »

This is a good move by Microsoft, but from what I can tell this is only happening because Microsoft no longer has its dominant position.

Now that Microsoft has proper competition from Apple and Google it has to start playing nicer.

It would have been much more benevolent of them if they were still the monopoly power of 20 years ago.

Yay for competition.

Re: Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform

#825

Post by m_mueller »

72deluxe wrote: post #811
m_mueller wrote: post #684

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Oh, and the Nvidia binary drivers for the graphics card in this box. With NVIDIA drivers you probably have at least some LLVM compiled components (or will have, once their transition has been completed in future generations), but I give you that one. As a GPGPU developer for example, you probably soon can't get around LLVM anymore and I expect its influence to grow in the Linux world, as it has become the default c…

Isn't LLVM used in nvidia drivers for compiling shaders at runtime? GLSL needs compiling, and I thought everyone typically used LLVM for this?

I don't know much about OpenGL and can't confirm it from a quick google [1], but I could well imagine it if that JIT was either recently introduced by NVIDIA or ported over already - LLVM seems to be their company policy for anything compiler related now.

[1] http://http.developer.nvidia.com/Cg/cgc.html

Re: Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform

#826

Post by NicoJuicy »

icc97 wrote: post #824

This is a good move by Microsoft, but from what I can tell this is only happening because Microsoft no longer has its dominant position. Now that Microsoft has proper competition from Apple and Google it has to start playing nicer. It would have been much more benevolent of them if they were still the monopoly power of 20 years ago. Yay for competition.

Microsoft still has an absolute monopoly in desktop OS: http://goo.gl/oBY93k .

And microsoft never had a monopoly on mobile (smartphones + dumbphones)

So, what exactly has been changed the last 20 years? In my country (Belgium and my work also sells computers / laptops), practicly all laptops / notebooks / desktops are Windows (we have a sister company which is a computer store)...

Re: Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform

#827

Post by Tyrannosaurs »

moonchrome wrote: post #249
Tyrannosaurs wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't Xamarin have a load of other stuff around testing and the like? It could just mean a move away from Xamarin as a core development tool into producing things which support development on these platforms.

I highly doubt Microsoft will release and support Linux/OSX/iOS/Android API bindings. What will likely happen is Microsoft will : * open source the core libs * open source the JIT * make sure it works on all platforms * open source the ASP.NET and port it to Linux/Mac so they can separate Azure from being a Windows only cloud service Xamarin then packages these in to Mono and Xamarin.iOS/Android providing a layer on…

I agree re Linux and OSX but I could see iOS and Android. The scale of mobile is such that if you want to be relevant in the way MS have historically, they're two platforms you can't ignore.

Re: Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform

#828

Post by m_mueller »

sergiosgc wrote: post #801
m_mueller wrote: post #649

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im curious, can you really get by without MS, Google and Apple? No LLVM based products for you? No Webkit? No CUPS? No V8? If you do use some of these projects, where's the difference from an Open Sourced .NET?

Hmm, yes I can. Gcc, gecko, cups predates apple, spidermonkey...

While you can, it's not always that simple. Say you want to make a Qt application with a web frame - Qt-Webkit seems to be the most mature for that matter. Spidermonkey seems to be quite a bit behind V8 in terms of performance, tooling and framework support (Node.js ecosystem) as well, so I'm not sure it's a real alternative today. Do you use it for production level serverside-javascript systems?

Also, do you only use older CUPS versions because Apple pays its development for a while now?

Re: Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform

#829

Post by martijn_himself »

alkonaut wrote: post #623
daveloyall wrote: post #576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hanselman is suggesting that we should just say Aww, shucks! and give Microsoft a big hug? He has so completely missed the deadly point that he's accidentally echoed it in his own post: Tons of people feel that Microsoft killed their Pappy. Nadella's actions tell me one thing: the free software movement has threatened their bottom line. This is not the time to back down, it's not the time to forgive and forget. This…

It's not mainly that free software threats their bottom line, it's rather that mobile and cloud is the future, and traditionally their bottom line was of course server and desktop. So they are being very aggressive in the cloud and mobile area which is understandable. But where does this leave .NET, visual studio etc? Those are no longer the tools with which megacorps make their intranets, or where Photoshop and Call…

Good points. Except:

>But where does this leave .NET, visual studio etc? Those are no longer the tools with >which megacorps make their intranets, or where Photoshop and Call Of Duty is made

.NET was never the tool where Photoshop and Call of Duty was made, but a significant amount of mobile apps and games nowadays are made using Xamarin and Unity, tools that run on top of Mono, a cross-platform implementation of .NET. If anything the Microsoft announcement brings Mono and .NET closer together. And I think you will find that a significant (if not majority) proportion of megacorps do run their intranets on SharePoint. SharePoint is and has been customisable using .NET libraries and tools.

Re: Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform

#830

Post by icc97 »

NicoJuicy wrote: post #826
icc97 wrote: post #824

This is a good move by Microsoft, but from what I can tell this is only happening because Microsoft no longer has its dominant position. Now that Microsoft has proper competition from Apple and Google it has to start playing nicer. It would have been much more benevolent of them if they were still the monopoly power of 20 years ago. Yay for competition.

Microsoft still has an absolute monopoly in desktop OS: http://goo.gl/oBY93k . And microsoft never had a monopoly on mobile (smartphones + dumbphones) So, what exactly has been changed the last 20 years? In my country (Belgium and my work also sells computers / laptops), practicly all laptops / notebooks / desktops are Windows (we have a sister company which is a computer store)...

The mobile OS is the big change. So where as Microsoft still has control of the desktop OS, the desktop OS is a much smaller share of the whole OS market.

I'm coincidentally in Belgium too :) Any chance you work for CoolBlue then?

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