Comment by SneakerXZ
11 years ago
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.
11 years ago
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.
I think it would be a long way from useless.
The garbage collector for example would be very interesting to peruse. Sure threading and synchronization code would be differ but these have been emulated on Linux before to good effect, I don't see any serious barriers there.
Microsoft has released the source for a .Net VM (CLR) in the past: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_Source_Common_Language_I... It supported FreeBSD and MacOS X. This suggests it would not be impossible for them to make a multiplatform .NET in the future.
A significant subset of .NET had to exist anyway for Silverlight to run on the Mac.
I'm sure the codebase is factored internally to have some sort of platform abstraction.