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Mono+Ikvm Runs Eclipse 38

miguel writes "Today Zoltan Varga announced that he got Eclipse running on Mono using the open source IKVM Java virtual machine for .NET by Jeroen Frijters. This is the first time a complete free software JVM implementation can run eclipse in a reasonable time. This runs with our latest Mono release. Mandatory screenshot"
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Mono+Ikvm Runs Eclipse

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  • .Net (Score:2, Insightful)

    by unny ( 57609 )
    "One question might be, and I'll be as direct as I can be about this,
    what is .Net? Unlike Windows, where you could say it's a product, it
    sits in one place, it's got a nice little box. In some senses, it's a
    very good question."
    - Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, at a Microsoft .Net briefing day in July

    "We don't have the user-centricity. Until we understand context, which
    is way beyond presence -- presence is the most trivial notion of
    context."
    - Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, on the same topic at the same briefing
    • So Steve Ballmer is unable to speak coherently. So what? Not his fault, he's constrained by all the weird corporate mumbo-jumbo.

      Let's ignore all that, and just focus on .NET the software platform. As such it's pretty much designed as an alternative to Java, or more specificaly Java 2 Enterprise Edition. Anything else is just noise -- or an excuse to make cheap jokes.


      • So Steve Ballmer is unable to speak coherently. So what? Not his fault, he's constrained by all the weird corporate mumbo-jumbo.


        Actually, being the CEO of the company, one could argue that he's much less a poor helpless victim of corporate mumbo-jumbo, but that instead, he's responsible for it.
        • You think CEOs write their own mumbo-jumbo? That takes specialized training!

          But what you're really saying is that we should hold a CEO responsible for all the vagueness and dissimulation a company engages in. I guess you're right, but I also think that the modern CEO doesn't have that much free will, being dictated to by the insane requirement of 21st century capitalism.

          • I didn't say he writes his own mumbo-jumbo, but that he's responsible for it. But I guess nowadays noone is responsible for anything anymore, society's cruel 21st century capitalism is at fault, oppressing poor little Microsoft CEO Ballmer whose only got $ 16 billion to his name and robbing the poor thing of his free will.

            Gimme a break already, the man could give away 90% of what he owns and still be as rich as Donald Trump, if he disagreed with anything that was being "forced" upon him by evil MS-Sharehol
            • Well OK, Steve is a bad person. But even if he Saw The Light and reformed, what would happen? They'd fire him, and replace him with somebody who was With the Program.

              That's the real problem: the intentions of the individual don't matter, the system just selects people who are Right For The Job. That's why we have CEOs who talk like they're from an alternate universe where human logic does apply, and legislators who are as corrupt as year-old milk, and presidents who have the moral stature of Mafia Allumin

  • by GoRK ( 10018 ) * on Saturday May 10, 2003 @07:53PM (#5928111) Homepage Journal
    Does anyone know what the hell this actually *MEANS*?

    Is this sort of like the one time I ran the TI-85 emulator inside of vMac inside of VirtualPC on a Mac, or am I just missing something? Or maybe the time that I ran VPC in ShapeShifter inside of UAE on the PC?!?!

    And, again, we are supposed to use this sort of thing in *ENTERPRISE COMPUTING* .. or am I again missing something?

    ~GoRK
    • I have no idea :)

      I also don't see why someone would want to write a JVM for the .NET CLR, perhaps someone wiser than I could enlighten us (after looking on the IKVM FAQ [ikvm.net] none of these questions were answered partically well.. :)

    • Eclipse is written in java.
      Someone wrote a jvm for .net (mono)
      So now eclipse can run on .net

      This offers the advantages of being able to be compilied to the native platform ( I think - i don't follow .net too much) and technically you could from eclipse call functions written in other languages on .net.

    • Meaning (Score:5, Informative)

      by fm6 ( 162816 ) on Saturday May 10, 2003 @08:32PM (#5928280) Homepage Journal
      Does anyone know what the hell this actually *MEANS*?
      That's actually quite an important question. Let me give it a stab.

      As I've previously argued [slashdot.org], .NET has some nice technical advantages over J2EE, but probably has no hope of overcoming Java's lead. (And even if it did MS would just screw it up.) But the Java/.NET thing doesn't have to be an either/or choice. It only works that way because Microsoft has very deliberately excluded Java backward compatibility from .NET. (There's J# or whatever it's called now, but that's just a migration path.)

      Now, various open source people have gone off doing what they do best, and their efforts are beginning to converge:

      • Mono, the open-source version of .NET, seems to be moving forward apace.
      • The IKVM people seem to have negated Microsoft's non-support for Java.
      • Mono's biggest missing piece is an IDE. Eclipse is a first-rate IDE, and now runs under Mono.
      • Aside from giving Mono an IDE, Varga has given an impressive demonstration of the robustness of IKVM and Mono.
      So the whole Java versus .NET debate has changed radically, and now may be less of debate than a negotiation towards coexistence.

      Of course, Microsoft will almost certainly make silly, unnecessary changes .NET that will render it incompatible with Mono. But that might actually work against them, and destroy the Evil Empire's control of .NET.

        • Mono's biggest missing piece is an IDE. Eclipse is a first-rate IDE, and now runs under Mono.

        Although it's not part of mono, (neither is Eclipse), SharpDevelop [icsharpcode.net] is a nice IDE for c#. Unfortunately it still only supported on the M$ .NET framework, under windows. It's very similar to VS.NET in terms of interface and features (although there were a few things that I found slow or missed).
        IMHO, even emacs is a better IDE than eclipse for anything other than java. There are syntax and compiler integration

      • As another poster noted there is sharpdevelop as an Open Source .NET IDE. Also, I'm not really sure what significance eclipse running under the MONO CLR means in terms of a .NET development environment. AFAIK Eclipse doesn't allow you to build anything .NET related at the moment, and even if it did it's not really important that it also _run_ under .NET. Normally it would seem logical that a development tool run under the platform it is developing for, but if you were going to use the eclipse framework to d
      • C# Development support in Eclipse (via plugins) is still pretty weak. If you take a java IDE, and make it run under a different VM, it is still a java IDE.

        I see this more as a watermark for the increasing maturity of the mono project than anything else.
        • For that matter, Ikvm isn't a proper project -- their home page is just a blog. And Mono itself is a long way from being something people would actually use. So perhaps I was too enthusiastic. But if things keep moving, Mono could become an alternative for both Java and C# programmers.
    • by miguel ( 7116 ) on Saturday May 10, 2003 @08:33PM (#5928283) Homepage
      IKVM is a JIT compiler for JVM to .NET code. So there is no emulator involved, it just JITs from JVM to CIL bytecodes, and then Mono JITs the CIL bytecodes into native x86 code.

      What this shows is two things: the maturity of the IKVM JITer and the maturity of the Mono runtime as it is able to host this technologically advanced VM to run a large and complex application.

      IKVM also helps bridge the two worlds: Java and CIL. Your Java code can then be loaded and used by CIL applications (C#, VB, etc) all running together.

      Miguel.
    • I think it's pretty clear from the post:
      Today someone you've never heard of announced that he got something you've never heard of running on something else you've never heard of using the open source Java virtual machine you've never heard of for .NET by someone else you've never heard of. Apparantly this is the first time anyone has ever done anything like this.
    • I'm further confused by that screenshot.

      It appears to be Windows 2000 running cygwin, running WindowMaker. Now that could very well be a remote desktop but at first I was thinking this was running under w2k.

      At any rate, my head is spinning with the layers of emulation, JIT, network transparency and translation taking place.

    • Is this sort of like the one time I ran the TI-85 emulator inside of vMac inside of VirtualPC on a Mac, or am I just missing something?

      Judging by the screenshot, it's more like the time you recompiled Eclipse to run on .NET, ported .NET to run on top of POSIX/X11, but short-circuited the .NET graphics subsystem (which you hadn't written yet) so that you could directly ask GTK to make X11 primitives, so that the POSIX/X11 could directly send Win32 API calls to the Win32 environment layer on top of the Win2
    • I think the difference is that in this case it is _faster_ to run IKVM inside Mono than to run a free JVM directly. I don't know whether this means that Mono and IKVM are well-written, or that free JVMs are incredibly slow, or both.

      I wonder if you can invoke IKVM/Mono directly with a wrapper that looks just like 'java' or 'jre' or 'kaffe', but runs faster?

      (Also: has anyone tried compiling Eclipse using gcj? Surely that would be faster than running it under Mono.)
  • by Anonymous Coward
    ...for businesses to start depending on Mono and related technologies! For us, it'll be like opening your christmas presents and finding batteries already installed!

    Ahhh, but I've revealed too much already...

    - Microsoft
    - Patent Portfolio Management
  • Man, this rules! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by RevAaron ( 125240 ) <revaaron AT hotmail DOT com> on Sunday May 11, 2003 @12:07AM (#5929108) Homepage
    This is awesome!

    Since .NET's original annoucnement, I've thought that it was a really cool potential technology. As a Mac and Linux guy, I kept myself from getting too excited, as there was little chance MS would do a port themselves to these platforms. But then Mono and dotGNU were announced. And the potential of this couldn't be denied- Mono was/is a project led by *the* Miguel nonetheless. So now, as a Mac and Linux guy, a *free* implementation of .NET was within reach. I probably wouldn't have been as hopeful if it was just some SourceForge page someone put up, but no, big names were behind Mono.

    We have been seeing very steady progress for a while, and now we are getting something quite meaty indeed. If running Eclipse on Mono isn't proof that Mono is becoming a viable solution for many coders, I don't know what is. .NET provides many technical advantages over Java and other systems. Hell, I would even go so far as to say that MS *innovated* with its creation. It was a pretty bold thing to base their future on. The technology to do something like .NET has been around for a while, but never before has it been done in a way that interop between languages was so transparent and seamless.

    Sure, you've been able to run other languages on the Java VM for a while. You've been able to run other languages on various Smalltalk VMs for longer. You've been able to run other languages on Lisp VMs for even longer than that! However, none of the attempts before .NET provided such a neat little package for such a system.

    I occassionally laugh when some Java advocate points to the Java languages page [tu-berlin.de] when someone else brings up that .NET can do seamless interop between many languages. Even if I have Jython and Bistro installed, there is no (relatively simple) way that I can subclass classes written in Java in Bistro/Smalltalk, write some of the methods in Jython, and then do the scripting in JTcl. It could be done with a hefty amount of additional code to call various evalLanguage()-ish methods, but luckily, we don't have to do that with .NET.

    I am a Smalltalk programmer. I am a Mac and Linux user. I am also an ecologist. The last thing I want to do is switch to Java just so I could have access to a few more libraries for data analysis. I think it is silly for Sun to expect every programmer in the world to switch to its language without hestitation. It may work on the C++ guys, who are usually moving up in the language food chain by switching to the Java language on the Java platform, but for me, it'd be a downgrade. A decrease in productivity. A decrease in flexibility. Etc. The list goes on. However, with .NET, I don't have to use the One True Language that any one vendor hath ordained, and with Mono, I don't even have to use the One True Runtime Implementation. With the newly released #Smalltalk, things are looking pretty damn good from here. ANSI Smalltalk, yet access to all classes and code written for the .NET VM available like any other Smalltalk class. And if someone else wants to use my code later on, she won't have to convert it, open up the parts she wants to some RPC protocol or anything else like that- she can just subclass it. Or instantiate it... like it should be.

    Christ, I rambled plenty for this post...

    Many thanks to the Mono team!
  • isn't it possible to run eclispe under blackdown java (or why is a patented api more free than an open source java implementation) and what about the \. article about running eclispse unde gcj (i think we could call gnu free)

  • Is there any way to go the other way? From .net to java ??

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