Microsoft Announces An LLVM-Based Compiler For .NET

[pal666]

Why is MS doing all this?

their compilers suck. it is cheaper to use llvm

[pal666]

No, C# is pretty damn sweet.
I think it is the best language right now.

think again

[Luke_Wolf]

Yes, I know WPF or DirectX are not required when developing applications or games in .net. But people uses them in lots of projects, and this open source release isn't going to make any change here, as those parts will remain closed. Applications like paint.net, flashdevelop... are windows only and will still be after this.

Correct, but this statement is a rather far cry from your original one which was that games and desktop applications couldn't be written in .NET that work on linux, which is objectively wrong. However this is true of any language or platform. If you use platform specific APIs then it's not going to be portable away from that platform without additional work. If you wish to make Linux Applications you can use GTK or in the near future Qt, and if you want to make cross platform games you can use SDL. Complaining that C# isn't portable because of winforms and WPF is like complaining that C or C++ isn't portable because of Win32.

I don't understand exactly the role of LLVM here. Is it that MS will let any LLVM-based language to be executed in the .NET runtime, or is it that the C# compiler will emit LLVM IR code and get executed by LLVM?

Roslyn Emits MSIL, this LLVM thing will take MSIL and JIT or AoT (in the future) compile it to the specific hardware platform.

... only if the entire GUI platform API/libs are made available...

If you're particularly married to WinForms or WPF maybe, Qt# is around the corner however. That said while it's not totally certain I can definitely see WPF getting open sourced.

[justmy2cents]

mono is already obsolete since the moment of its inception. It has always been behind the official .net implementation, which renders it completely useless, unless you plan to rewrite your shell scripts in c#

based on this comment, i'd say you have absolutely 0 experience with mono.

[doom_Oo7]

If you wish to make Linux Applications you can use GTK or in the near future Qt,

uh... you could make Qt Linux applications before GTK even existed....

[Luke_Wolf]

uh... you could make Qt Linux applications before GTK even existed....

Have you ever heard of this thing called context? It's bleedingly obvious that I was referring to .NET Linux Applications, in which case no you have not been able to make Qt applications, there has been attempts at making Qt available on .NET before but the ports were never really complete. On the other hand Qt# through the use of Cppsharp has been making headway on a proper port

[cyrix]

Correct, but this statement is a rather far cry from your original one which was that games and desktop applications couldn't be written in .NET that work on linux, which is objectively wrong. However this is true of any language or platform. If you use platform specific APIs then it's not going to be portable away from that platform without additional work. If you wish to make Linux Applications you can use GTK or in the near future Qt, and if you want to make cross platform games you can use SDL. Complaining that C# isn't portable because of winforms and WPF is like complaining that C or C++ isn't portable because of Win32.

Well, I never said C# was not portable. I said .NET wasn't fully portable, and it isn't. And as opposed to other alternatives like Java or Qt, those windows-only closed API's are part of the framework, and microsoft even encourages their use. So it's not like calling native C posix code from your Java application, but instead using some of the APIs microsoft provides for some tasks.

[pasaulais]

From yesterday's talk at EuroLLVM, Microsoft seems to want more people to use C# and .NET in general. That's why they are open sourcing it and working on multi-platform support. Andrew Ayers mentioned that the LLVM-based JIT they are developing works on Linux x86_64, which is great news in my opinion.

[Luke_Wolf]

Well, I never said C# was not portable. I said .NET wasn't fully portable, and it isn't. And as opposed to other alternatives like Java or Qt, those windows-only closed API's are part of the framework, and microsoft even encourages their use. So it's not like calling native C posix code from your Java application, but instead using some of the APIs microsoft provides for some tasks.

First off how does that statement, mesh with this one?

By the way, all this open sourcing from microsoft isn't really going to change anything here. Most .net APIs apart from the server side ones are deeply tied to the windows api. This means no way you can run .net applications/games on linux.

Second, you're wrong. The .NET Framework as defined by ECMA is 100% portable (Hence why Mono was able to be created in the first place). WPF and WinForms (or for that matter ASP.NET) are not part of .NET anymore than Qt is part of C++ or GTK part of C, just because Microsoft happens to bundle them by default doesn't make it part of .NET, and as always when you choose to write platform specific code you're making an active choice for it to be non-portable, and again arguing that those make C# or .NET unportable is like arguing that the existence of win32 or directx make C and C++ unportable. The developer is completely free to not use those APIs.

[cyrix]

Second, you're wrong. The .NET Framework as defined by ECMA is 100% portable (Hence why Mono was able to be created in the first place). WPF and WinForms (or for that matter ASP.NET) are not part of .NET anymore than Qt is part of C++ or GTK part of C, just because Microsoft happens to bundle them by default doesn't make it part of .NET, and as always when you choose to write platform specific code you're making an active choice for it to be non-portable, and again arguing that those make C# or .NET unportable is like arguing that the existence of win32 or directx make C and C++ unportable. The developer is completely free to not use those APIs.

OK... you win! C# and .NET are fully open source and portable.

...however, only 1% of the client-side applications made with those technologies will work on non-windows OSes, despite all this open sourcing "effort"