Comment by Locke1689
11 years ago
Everyone on Roslyn is really excited about this and we hope that it serves as a signal that big things are happening in .NET to make the entire platform more open and agile!
P.S. We're the Visual Basic compiler too :)
From an open source neckbeard to a MS employee, thanks!!!
Man, this is a crazy world. Cats and dogs living together. Open source MS projects. The falcon cannot hear the falconer
Heh, before joining the C# compiler team I actually hacked on a stripped down Linux kernel and VMM targeted at high performance computing, contributed to ffmpeg and QEMU, ran Arch Linux with xmonad as my main machine, and did my Masters' thesis on Racket in Git, so I'm pretty used to open source.
This is basically old hat for me -- I'm just glad Microsoft agrees it's the way to go. :)
What's the likelihood the .NET VM is open sourced as well? I use Mono right now to run my apps on Linux but it would be great to use the official implementation since Mono has subtle differences.
That's the main thing I would be interested in also, but I'm thinking that's one thing that we WILL NOT see. That could seriously undercut the need to buy Windows servers.
"Devices & services" Azure is your servers and the .net + C# tooling story from dev to deploy makes the question of selling Windows servers in a VM world moot. Many of the moves coming out of this Build seem to point to a world where it's going to be cheaper and easier to pay for all the MS services and tooling than to try to cobble it together with other people and platforms.
We're looking at a lowered on-ramp to .net apps that run more smoothly than java+linux+every-support-tool-bit (dev-wise) across devices (and things). It's compelling.
Everything from dev to deployment and ops is getting touched at this conf. This shows where MS's strengths can present differentiation. Their profit source is, and has been, building/selling tools and platforms for others to run businesses. When the thing people hate becomes more like what they aspire to have/be, the tension is palpable.
Google is about the only other player nearly capable. But Google's mission has far less to do with selling shovels vs. harvesting and monetizing.
Apple is just not in this space. If anything, they sure feel like a device-only company in this conversation. WWDC is about the garden. Build is handing out spades, shovels, and, now, dirt.
Xamarin's Evolve, last year, felt a bit like all this does. The are big things happening. If nothing else, at least it feels like change, if not progress for devs and consumers.
There's a trade off though. If C# only runs on Windows then a lot of developers who run Linux will never consider C# as an option. If it does run on Linux, then those developers might end up purchasing Visual Studio in order to develop C#. A lot of developers who previously used C# are also leaving the tech for others like Ruby since they aren't tied to Windows.
Yeah. Historically at least, the Mono runtime was one of the weak points when running C# code on Linux and I expect it drove a fair few Windows sales - you could develop applications under Linux but if you wanted them to run well you needed to pay out for Windows licenses. (I believe it's improved a fair amount over the years but is still behind.)
The .NET VM would be pretty much useless on other platforms. It is tied to Windows and it would be pretty hard to rewrite. But standard libraries would be different story.
3 replies →
Even if they were to do that, I doubt that it's portable cross platform code. Someone will need to port it, and it's hard to know how the effort required compares with the effort required to optimize the Mono runtime to be as good as the MS one running on Windows...
as someone who doesn't know a whole lot about the .net ecosystem - does this open the possibility for writing server side c#.net web applications that run on linux, with full parity with the windows environment? with or without mono?
The C# compiler is written in C#, so you can use it anywhere with a .NET runtime. Microsoft doesn't ship a .NET runtime for Linux, so you'll have to use Mono, but if your app is compatible with Mono, you're good to go!
How does something like this happen? How can you write a compiler in the language that it is supposed to be compiling?
11 replies →
Is Mono able to compile Roslyn?
5 replies →
So does that mean one can reasonably expect to use official F# implementation(compiler, vm, libraries) in Linux within the coming months/years?
F# is already distributed with Mono as it is open source
Lots of people use it
I'm not sure any of this would have happened without Miguel. Mono really gave .NET a second life when MS dropped the ball.
It's also somehow satisfying to witness Xamarin's success and further opening of .NET after all the bashing and hating Mono received from the free software community.
1 reply →