Portable.NET Now 100% Free Software 429
rhysweatherley writes "Finally after months of hard work and bucket loads of caffeine, the
DotGNU community has finally got
Portable.NET
to the point of building our C# libraries on many Free Software
platforms with our own C# compiler.
This is a big deal! Portable.NET is now 100% pure Free Software,
with no dependencies on third party C# tools. The compiler, which
is written in C, bootstraps off gcc, so there are no icky 'how to
compile the compiler' problems. And it's fast! The DotGNU team consists of lots of contributors, many of whom are
coincidentially named 'Rhys Weatherley,' but this wouldn't have been
possible without the support of the DotGNU community, especially
the Weekend Warriors. .NET is not the only thing we are doing. We're playing around with JVM and Parrot (of perl6 fame) backends to the compiler. And we have a
C compiler front-end that generates pure bytecode apps that can run
on any decent CIL implementation (Portable.NET, Mono, etc). We are about 95% of the way towards our first milestone of an
ECMA-compatible C# implementation. There are lots of things still
to be done in the low-level C# libraries, runtime engine, and the
compiler. So, if you have some time on your hands, and like messing with
languages and stuff, like yours truly ... have look and maybe
have some fun!"
.NET for Linux (Score:5, Funny)
So confused... Is it weekends that we like MS, or just Saturdays, or just 6-7pm EST...
Damn it...
Re:.NET for Linux (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyway we don't like MS any time but when your "enemy" (I don't know that too many of us could call M$ our nemesis beyond RMS and other GNU/Zealots) has a good idea, you don't just disregard it. You use it for your own ends. This is what "we" (the free/open software movement members; users are members by extension as well) are working towards by implementing such things as Mono. There's no reason we can't implement heavily cross-platform OO software using C# and .NET on Unix. It doesn't even have to run on Windows!
Re:.NET for Linux (Score:4, Funny)
Rule 1: Everything from Microsoft is bad.
Rule 2: Unless Miguel says it's good, in which case it's good.
Rule 3: If you need it to play games, it's a necessary evil. X-Box purchases can be justified by asserting that they cost Microsoft money, and one is therefore attacking "Micro$haft" by buying one.
Re:.NET for Linux (Score:5, Funny)
A lot of their ideas are actually someone else's.
Re:.NET for Linux (Score:3, Informative)
Word is a junk product as far as I am concened, but Excel 1.0 was clearly superior to the competition when it came out for the Mac. I know several people who dumped their PCs running Lotus after working with Excal. Of course they switched back when Excel came out for Windows.
Unfortunately Microsoft's market position has effectively quashed any attempts to displace Excel as the standard spreadsheet. There was a time when Wingz was better than Excel, and Lotus had a very interesting product for OS/2 for a while. This is very bad as far as I am concerned because Excel is really oriented more towards business users than I would like - which makes it harder to use for the scientific and engineering applications I am involved in.
Re:.NET for Linux (Score:2)
Microsoft hasn't been all that good at innovating. [vcnet.com] The only real innovations I can think of were Microsoft Bob, and it's bastard child from Hell clippy. Neither score major points with me, though I give them points for being attempts at least to break away from the WIMP metaphor..
Re:.NET for Linux (Score:5, Insightful)
And Linux would be what? a trully innovative implementation of a 30 year old operating system using the same coding techniques.
The whole industry is the same. Lotus didn't invent the spreadsheet, Oracle didn't invent SQL, Apple didn't invent the windows and mouse GUI, Linus didn't invent UNIX. Most of the ideas in UNIX are taken from Multics.
Re:.NET for Linux (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:.NET for Linux (Score:3, Insightful)
MS is kind of like the anti-PARC. Where Xerox PARC came up with revolutionary things but could never put them to market, MS stares so much at the market it can't come up with any revolutionary things. Thing is, they have anough money to buy the revolutionary things, and do what they do best, polish them and market and sell them.
Re:.NET for Linux (Score:4, Informative)
DotGnu and Mono (Score:5, Interesting)
Can someone please tell me I'm wrong and explain why?
Re:DotGnu and Mono (Score:5, Informative)
DotGNU is a GNU project and has a CLR/.NET environment sub-project called Portable.NET. Some of the key differences with Portable.NET and Mono are:
PNet has a C# compiler written in C that is very fast, but not as complete. As a consequence it does not suffer from bootstrapping problems.
PNet's compiler architecture is meant to provide great support for new CIL language compilers. Currently, cscc (that's the IL compiler suite) supports compiling C and C# to CIL with other languages on the way. It can also compile a subset of C# to the JVM.
PNet only has an interpreter called ilrun (no JIT) at this time. PNet's libraries are not as far along, but one of the goals is complete ECMA compatibility while Mono's goal is to track Microsoft.NET as
closely as possible. PNet is also talking with the Perl/Parrot folks about supporting C# on the next generation Perl runtime.
Re:DotGnu and Mono (Score:2, Interesting)
Can you back this point up? My understanding is that Mono has a LOT of community participation, where Portable.NET is for the most part a one-man show. It seems to me that the "community" is largely backing Mono.
Re:DotGnu and Mono (Score:2, Troll)
Re:DotGnu and Mono (Score:2)
Limits? (Score:2)
Yes a limit ;) (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:DotGnu and Mono (Score:2)
Work is being pursued on the topic of System.Windows.Forms using WineLib on non-Win32 architectures.
Please read the Mono System.Windows.Forms page for more information.
Re:DotGnu and Mono (Score:2)
Sorry, the link should go here [go-mono.com].
Gotta preview next time.
Re:DotGnu and Mono (Score:5, Funny)
(BTW, someone posted the source for a great clone of ed, indistiguishable from the standard version for normal users on everything2.com:Oh crap, I'm really off-topic here...
Re:DotGnu and Mono (Score:3, Informative)
int main( void )
{
char buffer[1000];
for(;;)
{
printf( "- " );
fgets(buffer, 1000, stdin);
printf( "?\n" );
}
}
i can't wait ... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:i can't wait ... (Score:2)
ye of little faith, thinking Microsoft would have to wait until 2002 for a cross platform threat...
Re:i can't wait ... (Score:5, Interesting)
> thinking Microsoft would have to wait until 2002
> for a cross platform threat...
No, they had to wait until they had a Java-a-like that they could control, and a bunch of silly collaborators to port it to anything in sight for them. Convincing the world to make regular payments for the continuing use of their products, as opposed to one charge up front would also be a big help.
Then they can pull out the operating system Microsoft Research has been sitting on since the late 1990's. The operating system that is platform independent and runs on top of their Java replacement. The operating system that will swallow the internet into a single giant distributed network under their control, giving them the 100% monopoly of their wildest dreams. The operating system called Millennium (http://research.microsoft.com/research/sn/Millen
With per use charging, the OS itself could be given away on CD ala AOL, made available for free download, and/or automatically installed on XP machines via Windows Update (gee, I hope you didn't install XP Service Pack 1 which includes permission for them to do this and the
I don't think we have too long to wait.
Mind you, this is a giant gamble on Microsoft's part, and they are as likely to get nuked (figuratively, or even literally if a foreign country gets too annoyed with Microsoft's attempt to take over their country's computers) as they are likely to succeed. I don't think the company would survive a stunt like this, but they survived Bob, the antitrust trial's joke of a penalty phase, and Licensing 6.
This isn't a case of poor misunderstood Microsoft, either. Why else would they codename the original Millennium JVM "Borg" (http://research.microsoft.com/research/sn/)?
Shinoda: "The age of Millennium."
Io: "What does that mean?"
Shinoda: "A thousand year kingdom. It wants to create a home for itself. There is one flaw in its plan: Godzilla."
"Godzilla 2000 Millennium" (Japanese version)
Re:i can't wait ... (Score:2, Funny)
wow (Score:2, Informative)
Re:wow (Score:2)
objective analysis (Score:4, Interesting)
But in terms of pure technological merit, c# is a damn good language! Especially if you use the vs.net ide, you can get stuff done way fast. So keep an open mind w/ this language. It's very exciting to be able to build stuff using vs.net, and deploy on linux.
Keep up the good work on this project guys!!
Re:objective analysis (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.icsharpcode.net/OpenSource/SD/defaul
Re:objective analysis (Score:2)
Re:objective analysis (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:objective analysis (Score:3, Funny)
But in terms of pure technological merit, c# is a damn good language!
Compared to Perl, everything looks like a damn good language.
Re:objective analysis (Score:3, Insightful)
It's a strongly-type, object-oriented, Java/C++ descendent. It breaks no new ground, but it does have some nice incremental improvements over Java:
- xml-based documentation format (similar to javadoc, but more intuitive).
- richer collection of primitive data types
- conditional compilation macros
- properties (intead of get/set methods)
- automatic boxing/unboxing of primitive types [e.g., an int can be cast to an object]
- foreach() construct
- proper enumerations
- delegates (reduces verbosity when making one-method interfaces)
- attributes mechanism for annotating assemblies/classes/members
with meta-data (instead of using javadoc tags as a kludge)
Some off the above features have their dubious aspects. The really bad features (IMO) are:- fewer constraints on how things in your code (namespaces, classes)
must be arranged with things in your filesystem (directories, files)
- wierd behavior of virtual/override/new virtual
(I would provide you an example, but the lameness filter wouldn't
let me post C# code).
The bad points of C# are:- less disciplined than Java
- no dynamic inner classes (but Java didn't have them at first either, IIRC)
- no anonymous inner classes (maybe wrong on this one)
- less open source code, existing support, and tools than Java
But all in all, some of these things will improve with time. It should also be noted that the predominant IDE for C# (VisualStudio.NET), the documentation, and the core API's all suck. Especially the documentation... I opened up some Javadoc web pages after working withUltimately, C# may be the better language, but not by much. I can't help but look at Smalltalk and Scheme and think that these C-derivative language designers just don't get it. What I really want to see is a new generation of meta-languages that allow complex relationships and design patterns to be expressed at a high level in a compact fashion.
Corporate workplace (Score:3, Informative)
Congratulations to the development team on their achievement.
DotGNU IRC Meeting In Progress (Score:5, Informative)
Never thought this day would come (Score:3, Insightful)
Writing a new operating system? I choose C.
Coding up your own desktop environment? I choose C.
Desire to write the next award-winning PC game? I choose C.
I'm not sure why so many man months were spent trying to hook into
Sorry, but you people really confuse me sometimes. I write a few sentences of praise for Microsoft's latest operating systems just a few hours ago and I get marked as a troll. Now I see an article praising those who work hard to let Microsoft's
People: Make up your mind, or find a new hobby. people.
Re:Never thought this day would come (Score:5, Insightful)
Alternative C# compilers have the potential to undermine rather than extend the MS monopoly, simply because they are an alternative source for a C# platform.
The real trick would be getting C# programmers in the habit of targeting just the ECMA standard rather than the standard + MS lock-in extensions.
Re:Never thought this day would come (Score:2)
Didn't Microsoft itself provided a reference implementation that would work perfectly under BSD? What, they are shooting themselves in their feet?
It's crystal clear they want it embraced by other Operating Systems, but I don't really know why yet. But our pockets will sure find out sooner or later, as well as everyone else's pockets.
Re:Never thought this day would come (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Never thought this day would come (Score:2)
I though the whole point of .NET was that the language didn't matter? As long as you have a backend that produces .NET bytecode, you are already in buissness.
Re:Never thought this day would come (Score:2)
As far as language doesn't matter, that's true as far as it goes, but I don't think you can do the windows forms in java, and that's part of the productivity.
Re:Never thought this day would come (Score:4, Interesting)
1) The language and the technology may be good.
2) Creates more choice for the programmer.
3) Will have support (from Microsoft, so companies will demand it)
4) Will be known to many developers, that will expect C# support. Probably, you couldn't care less, but let's not forget some Windows apps are most desired under Linux or any os.
5) Nobody is talking about taking away options
6)
The things that I don't like are the suit fear, or bad moves that Microsoft may have in mind to leverage they IP on their
Re:Never thought this day would come (Score:4, Insightful)
One thing you didn't mention though is Web Applications which, though you may argue are no big deal, I would argue at least a 10-15% of the development going on centers around. A super set of that is B2B applications which probably account for 25-33% of the development going on. C # and Java are way better suited for web development and B2B development and have established frameworks to springboard from.
I understand about your frustrations with the fickleness of the /. crowd, but the excitement here is the choice to _not_ extend the monopoly. By creating a C# compiler, libraries, etc Portable.NET and Mono are allowing developers to not use Microsoft tools or Microsoft OS's to generate useful code. Yes MS created C#, but you don't have to use anything MS owned or controlled to use it. If it doesn't exist already, I wouldn't be surprised if there is an apache mod_aspx/C# in the works. People assume that because MS created it, it has to be bad and unusable by the OSS crowd. It's really not the case...
now to quote a reply I've seen to a comment like yours before:
Why do I need C, I can use assembly. :-)
Why do I need assembly, I can just type in 1's and 0's.
etc
psxndc
Re:Never thought this day would come (Score:2, Insightful)
I won't try to argue whether they would suceed or not without this extra help, but might it not be better to convince people to use java over c#?
C# succeding means MS still has oportunities to extend beyond the published specs. Sun has already shown that they won't tolerate that with Java.
Surely the future accesibility of the dev environment is safer under suns controll than evul M$????
Re:Never thought this day would come (Score:2, Informative)
Also, C code requires the maintenance of multiple versions of your application - at least for applications that have a GUI.
Moreover, OOP is big; C is not an object-oriented language, and C++ is, for many, a convoluted nightmare. When you're building truly portable (no rebuilding necessary) enterprising applications,
Don't be blinded by your hostility toward Microsoft. After all, these projects help undermine the dominance of Windows by providing an alternative platform on which to run your programs.
Maslow, hammers and nails. (Score:3, Insightful)
If you think C is the talismanic ne plus ultra of programming, I really think you need to get out more. Learn C++ and the STL; see what processor-intensive stuff you can do trivially with it. Learn LISP and grok the lambda calculus and the beauty of functional programming. Learn Python and Perl and see the coolness of executable pseudocode.
If the only language you let yourself use is C, then you're limiting yourself in ways which aren't good for either your mind or your career. C is a good tool and one that ought to be in every hacker's toolbox--but just like you can't be an effective carpenter if all you have is a hammer, you aren't going to be an effective hacker if you keep on swinging C at problems which call for LISP, Smalltalk or SPARK solutions.
Re:Never thought this day would come (Score:5, Informative)
I too once was a C zealot. Then I had a job at Compaq which required me to develop in TCL which I hated at first, but eventually it opened my eyes a lot.
These days I do 90% of my work in python, it's a bloody great language. I remember when I first started hacking C about a decade ago, I'd pump out these little programs quite quickly but anything large took a lot of time, usually debugging. I never got tierd of C but I suppose when I started programming professionally it lost a lot of its appeal.
Anyway, I diverge.
Python lets me create complex systems very fast. The first time I used python I worte a client/server chat program, it took about half a day to do (including the basic python tutorial). I find I don't have the time to fuck around with C anymore, I don't find the joy in hunting down bugs either (at least I hunt less in python).
I still use C on occasion though. But only then I can't do it fast enough in python, the C code is still usually ran from python in the end.
Re:Never thought this day would come (Score:4, Insightful)
As a matter of fact, one of my favorite programming techniques is impossible in C. I like to use reference counted smart pointers to handle memory management automatically. However, in C, there is no way to automate that -- you would have to manually call some sort of functions which increment and decrement the reference count, which defeats most of the purpose.
If I were writing an operating system, I would probably choose C. But a desktop environment? A game? I've worked on my own game engine (see my homepage), and the thought of trying to do it all in C makes me cringe. You might not agree, but I think you just don't know what you are missing.
I am actually now designing my own programming language. In my language, I have been able to write an IRC-like client/server chat program in 161 lines of code, and it would perform better than any but the most thoughfully designed C programs. Sure, you could write it in C, but why? Why spend days writing and debugging something that would take hours in another language?
Woohoo, I'm all psyched up to work on my compiler now. Time for a coding binge! Thanks!
Re:Never thought this day would come (Score:2)
Becuase if we hook into
No way that Microsoft is going to let THAT happen.
MS
Re:Never thought this day would come (Score:2, Funny)
Karma is, unlike what Taco wants you to believe, directly proportional to the size of your virtual dick.
(Yes, this is a feeble but hopefully successful attempt at humor)
Maybe Portable.NET could be used to bootstrap Mono (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Maybe Portable.NET could be used to bootstrap M (Score:2)
Yes, but somehow the *initial* Mono compiler had to be compiled, and to get that far MS's own C# compiler had to be used as a bootstrap compiler. After that initial compile, Mono no longer needs the MS compiler, but it had to be there originally to bootstrap.
Freshmeatt posting out ! (Score:4, Informative)
Get the release and report bugs if you can find !
PS: assigning them to me does not count as funHmmmm (Score:5, Interesting)
It's nice to have something like a this in the free software regime from a technical perspective, but is it really ever going to be anything but a little sister to the Microsoft version? Won't that reality diminish the corporate view that Linux is really just a hacker's toy, and if you want the real thing get Windows?
Interoperability and portability are good, but interoperability really occurs at the protocol level, and portability requires libraries.
I can see this resulting in are misleading market claims from Microsoft saying things like Lookie Here C# code is portable just like Java code !!
One good thing that could come out of this is that it might force Sun to loosen it's grip on Java a bit so that we get more serious open JVM's etc.
Re:Hmmmm (Score:2)
However, I thought Java was quite a bit open already. How else did HP, IBM and Tower create their own JVMs for HP-UX, Linux, Windows etc?
Re:Hmmmm (Score:2, Interesting)
They already built Rotor for that
plain mean competition
Especially they cannot take new patents on this
coz we hold prior art as on today !!
When MS invented
DotGNU to prevent MS from doing a "Run this
binary and trust us !" strategy
Re:Hmmmm (Score:2)
Re:Hmmmm (Score:2, Interesting)
Given MS' track record and general sentiments towards open or free software, I seriously can't see how anyone can think they don't have some sort of plan to make life difficult for .NET on non-Windows platforms -- or, at least, an ulterior motive with .NET in general. Killing Java is certainly one, but I doubt it is the only motivation they have.
Perhaps I'm wearing tinfoil, but I can't help but think that Mono and DotGNU are somehow being played the fool by Microsoft.
As a new c# programmer... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is an interesing development. However: I wonder how useful this language is on non-windows platforms. Let me explain.
You see, I have just started a new job that is heavily leveraging the
If you haven't written JScript, VBScript, or WSHScript, you have no idea just how amazingly powerful this is. A database connection & query takes around 4 lines of code. I was able to master in-code LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, aka Active Directory on Windoze boxes) queries in less than one day, having never touched an LDAP server in my life prior to that.
.GNU project aims to bring ActiveX functionality over to *NIX, and port all of the cool ActiveX objects like ADO (Database), DOM (XML), System.DirectoryServices (LDAP), FSO (Files), etc.
Sadly, *NIX has never really implimented anything like COM. Each programming language still has to be manually extended in some form or another to recognise new APIs -- headers for compiled languages (and remembering to link to the libraries), or worse, "extension agent" coding for dynamic languages like Perl and Python (assuming the API code is a binary shared library). And APIs are almost never identical accross multiple languages.
So, really: what is the need for C# on *NIX? None of my c# code that I am writing will port, because it is heavily dependent on the COM/ActiveX objects to get the real work done. Unless the
Is thes even feasible to do?
Re:As a new c# programmer... (Score:2, Informative)
None of the functional areas you mention are actually ActiveX objects - they are in fact namespaces in the
Re:As a new c# programmer... (Score:2)
That's why I don't know why people are embracing
Maybe someone could pull my head out of me ass, and tell me honestly why a developer would want to write a
Re:As a new c# programmer... (Score:5, Interesting)
First of all, most of the topics you mentioned are being implemented as part of the
ADO.NET is in System.Data
XML is in System.Xml
LDAP is an open standard that Microsoft does not own.
Developing these class libraries is part of the Mono project.
The language (C#) is not dependent on these vendor-specific libraries. It is quite easy to write code that will run on both Windows and Linux that does not involve any of them. Of course, it may not do what you want, but that's why Portable.NET/Mono/whoever is building the things they are.
It's not so much "why a developer would want to write a
Just my 2 cents.
To COM or not (Score:2)
The Microsoft advantage is the Microsoft disadvantage: there is a single vendor to cast interfaces into concrete.
In practice, I'd expect the most sucessful interfaces to become available as interface libraries to UNIX tools (in your example, that OpenLDAP would come with a C# interface in much the same way that Perl interfaces are ubiquitous in UNIX).
Having a choice between "vendors" in the UNIX world has advantages and disadvantages too, but plumbing between libraries and a language is a small matter of programming. How well it can be implemented is dependent on two factors:
How well the C# interface is documented
How well the MS code is written
The latter may sound surprising, but experience shows that the hardest thing in emulating MS libs more often than not is getting the implementation bug for bug compatible.
My experience has been mostly with C libraries and Perl interfaces, and I've never lost too much time gluing stuff together. Making that glue code reusable is much harder, and is helped a lot if you have an interface specification available (Java did a lot of good work in that area, and rumor has it C# does a good job at it too).
Documentation of the interfaces is what the success in practice hinges on.
Re:As a new c# programmer... (Score:5, Informative)
First of all, cOM is on it's way out. It is being replaced by the new remoting and web services architecture. The new component arch works much better and is far easier to understand then the iUnknown interface in COM. COM+ services (most notable, transactions) are still being supported, and I have no doubt that Mono will do a great job implementing these.
Sadly, *NIX has never really implimented anything like COM.
Not true. In fact, there is a COM implemented for UNIX called XPCOM. It's the foundation of Mozilla. In addition, COM itself is a copy of CORBA/IDL (the tools for Corba/IDL are fairly poor tho). Gnome uses CORBA, and KDE also uses a distributed object protocol. In additional, almost every language supports SOAP (including
So, really: what is the need for C# on *NIX? None of my c# code that I am writing will port, because it is heavily dependent on the COM/ActiveX objects to get the real work done. Unless the
It's a really good thing that
The Microsoft Upgrade Treadmill (Score:5, Insightful)
I've yet to see anyone address this point, which must be made. I'm not sure what that "remoting and web service architecture" is. I don't know. But I damn know one thing: in three or four years Microsoft will obsolete that technology, and it will be replaced with something else.
Microsoft receives significant revenue from training armies of MCSE, using endless arrays of certifications and development programs. And, as such, they have a vested interest in keeping the revenue alive with what I call a "steady technology churn." They can't just pick an API, and go with it for the long term future. They need to force all the MCSEs back into the training camps, in order to make sure that their paper certifications do not expire.
I dabbled with some Windows programming, many years ago. You wanna know one thing? Nothing that I've learned back then is worth today any more than a hair on my ass. VBX controls, DAOs, all of that has long been made obsolete. I've done _nix programming for quite sometime before trying the Windows waters, but I quickly figured out what was going on: that the primary occupation of a Windows developer is to provide revenue to Microsoft, in terms of continuing MSDN subscriptions, fees for an endless stream of documentation for Application Interface Of The Year.
"Developers, developers, developers", indeed...
So I quickly ended that short term experiment, and went back to hacking _nix. The thing about _nix -- which is 180 degrees opposite of Windows programming -- is that the skills and the knowledge that you've learned ten or fifteen years ago is still used, and is as valid today as it was back then. If you go and learn today's crop of Windows APIs, in just a couple of years all the time you've spent today would be a complete and a total waste of time, because nothing that you've learned now is relevant any more, it's been obsoleted.
On the other hand, things like file descriptors, pipes, sockets, and other basic POSIX APIs will still be just as useful ten years from now as they are today, and as they were ten years ago. That is not to say that you won't learn anything new in the mean time. On the contrary, I have learned many great _nix technologies over the years, and I'm sure that I'll keep learning more exciting stuff in the years to come.
The key difference is that everything that I will learn will only complement, enrich, and add to my existing, growing base of knowledge. Unlike with Windows, where its only purpose would be to replace stuff that's been obsoleted by Microsoft. As a Windows programmer, I'm in for a lifetime's worth of a struggle to keep churning through one API after another, one Microsoft language, or library, or interface API after another, all while being milked by Microsoft for the training and development fees in the mean time. As a _nix programmer, I'm in for a lifetime of enrichment and expansion of my technical skills and knowledge.
Re:As a new c# programmer... (Score:3, Interesting)
Dangerous Because of Microsoft Patent Claims Trap (Score:5, Interesting)
In comparison, Sun has granted the Apache and all open source developers FULL access to the specs, test kits and granted the full rights to develop competing products under the JSPA [apache.org]. Sun mhas also fully opened up the Java development standards process under the new Java Community Process (JCP) [jcp.org].
There those that claim that .NET is open to re-implementation, but until Microsoft make a simliar public legal declaration to Sun's JSPA, any .NET reimplementation represents a pending legal mindfield.
Re:Dangerous Because of Microsoft Patent Claims Tr (Score:2)
Java is as dangerous because of Sun patent trap (Score:4, Interesting)
This is wrong, or at least highly misleading. Sun has granted rights only to standard developed under the JCP from here on forward (and then only to participants in the JCP):
Sun has hundreds of patents on core Java technologies that are unrelated to JCP efforts, and Sun has granted no licenses to those. You would likely run into those if you tried to create an independent Java implementation.
Both C#/CLI and Java/JVM should be considered proprietary platforms covered by numerous patents. And both Sun and Microsoft have demonstrated that they cannot be trusted on intellectual property issues or commitments to open standards.
There are plenty of high quality, truly open languages and runtimes out there. Open source software developers are fools to waste any time on either C# or Java until Microsoft and/or Sun make binding commitments to make those platforms truly open.
Someone should patent .... (Score:2)
We know Microsoft choses names by methaphores or analogies, and never by pure luck or randomly.
Now the big question is what are the dangers of embaracing they IP that now looks "free" but may not be so in the future. I don't know, there must be something I am missing here.
why .net for linux? (Score:2, Insightful)
Bill and his buffoons must be laughing hard.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Dont you all see the pattern here? Oh geez, let's all begin developping using this so neat C$ language and let's contribute to this so great
The trap is set, and we are happily jumping on the trigger using both feet. Of course, Bill will help us out by releasing his
During this time, Java continues to die slowly, getting fewer and fewer developpers. Don't you realize that we are contributing in digging our own grave?
Java might be not so great, but it is still the only true alternative to this M$ obscenity.
Please people, read the J2EE spec, the Java language spec., and go play with JBoss for a while... Then, come back, and take another look at this
Wake up people!
Zruty
GUIs for Portable.NET, Mono, and Microsoft .NET (Score:3, Informative)
1. GTK# - C#/CLI Bindings to GTK+ 2.0. Works on Windows and Linux. It also has C# Bindings for GNOME 2.0 as GNOME#, GConf as GConf#, Glade as Glade#, etc...
http://gtk-sharp.sourceforge.net
2. QT# - C#/CLI Bindings to QT 3.0 and KDE. Runs on Linux, but it is difficult to run on Windows though. It currently uses QtC for its C# bindings, but this will change.
http://qtcsharp.sourceforge.net
3. Windows.Forms - the System.Windows.Forms like GUI uses Winelib in Wine and monostub.exe in mono to run on Linux, and it uses native Windows
4. ASP.NET - System.Web works on Linux and Windows. It can be tested with XSP test server.
So, to test this, you will need mono, mcs, and xsp.
I don't get it. (Score:3, Insightful)
But... why 2 frameworks? (Mono and DotGNU). Why is it so damn hard to just focus on the importance of a solid
Now, Mono can use more developers but these developers are working on their own port of
I know this has something to do with politics, something to do with licensing. It DOESN'T have anything to do with different technical views on the matter.
I simply can't understand why people are so far fetched focussed on politics instead of the art of software development. Now Linux will probably end up with Mono being finished way too late (if it's not finished in 2003, MS will release generics in
As a
Re:Cool (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Cool (Score:4, Insightful)
And they aren't going to get MS sorts using it (even ignoring the pre-installed issue that beat even Netscape's best efforts), because MS put lots of money, time, and talent into their own VM, and the GNU one just ain't gonna be significantly better any time soon.
The
Re:Cool (Score:4, Troll)
First, they are trying to do a full ECMA certification for NET and make it standard. In order to do what you are saying they will have to withdraw from the certification standard which immediately gives them a serious disadvantage in the war against java which is what this shit is about.
Second, deciding to apply for the certification process they have taken into account that making the language a standard will create alternative implementations. Not just GNU. There will be commercial ones as well. And that is the idea. Because there is something that makes
This is the idea of
Re:Cool (Score:3, Insightful)
They're quite frank about keeping
In fact that's what Sun is selling in every debate about
MS may let
What about Mac? (Score:3, Informative)
Why aren't they porting .NET/Windows Forms and so on to OS-X? For starters, it would make it easier to maintain their Office software base on a common platform. Are they worried that independant developers would do the same and mess up their master plan?
Sun has to strive for true platform independence with its Java, but since Microsoft is the Apple silent partner, what would be wrong, from Microsoft's dark, evil perspective, of running .NET on both Windows and Mac -- they run Office both places while there is no such thing as Linux-Office.
Re:Cool (Score:3, Informative)
As for your endianness claims, here's part of two messages from a Google group search on the issue:
One:
"Java specifies the endianness used in object files, and (I believe) the
endianness used when writing numbers to binary data files, but the
language is defined in such a way that there is no way for a program to
tell which endianness is used for in-memory representations. So long
as the JVM (Java Virtual Machine) implementation does the correct
conversions when reading in `.class' files and when read/writing binary
data files, it is free to use a little-endian represention internally."
Two:
"If you'd bothered to study the JVM before jumping to such conclusions
you'd know that, in a
_unaligned_ data of _variable-length_, endianness is completely
irrelevant. The thing _has_ to be parsed byte-by-byte... Not even
the bytecode vectors are aligned within the file, although the
tableswitch' and 'lookupswitch' bytecodes are word-aligned within the
code vectors, so these are the only constructs that would require
extra work on a little-endian machine, and only in the 25% of cases
where the code vector happens to be word-aligned by accident....
Incidentally the format of the constant pool _inside the JVM_ is
completely undefined and up to the implementor."
Re:Cool (Score:3, Insightful)
Besides, the
Re:title confusing (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Another Look (Score:3, Informative)
Yup they have copyrights but we are reproducing our implementation from ECMA spec (334 and 335) which are public
So their copyrights don't matter as we're not using their code . Their patents can be contested as ECMA does not look lightly on submarine patents
And we have GNu to support us !
Re:Another Look (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm guessing that the angry one here is probably Scott McNealy.
Sorry, Scott.
Re:Another Look (Score:2)
I like moft, and I follow their technological advances closely... and both of these platforms have got me wondering if some really high up technical person just made the call without consulting the lawyers...
Hah! That would be sweet: having a mole inside Moft.
Re:Another Look (Score:2)
I usually try to avoid this confusion by never using simply ".NET", since no one can really explain what it is due to how huge it is, just like the Matrix.
Instead of
Re:Another Look (Score:2)
2) Not everything is part of the ECMA standard, i think just the language and part of CIL spec.
Being a standard, it doesn't mean it's not patented stuff, so it's free now, but will it be free tomorrow?
Re:What springs to mind is (Score:2)
More often than not, imitating others is a way of beating them. I guide you to Microsoft if you need someone with better experience in this area.
Re:What springs to mind is (Score:2)
Having a
We all wish
Re:Someone care to explain... (Score:4, Informative)
gcc itself has a bootstrap problem. The gcc code itself is actually pretty gcc specific, non-standard C code that can't be directly compiled correctly by other compilers. So there's an extra step, the gcc build routne adds a bootstrap compiler - youdon't compile the real compiler directly, you compile a small 'gcc-ish' compiler that though not complete, has a sufficent enough subset of gcc-isms to compile the real compiler.
OK, I'll give it a go... (Score:2)
You have to use the Microsoft compiler (from Visual Studio
On the other hand, if you're DotGNU and write your C# compiler in C, you can use existing C compilers like gcc to compile csharpc. Once that's done you can write the interpreter and runtime libraries in C# if you like, since you now have a Linux copy of csharpc to compile them with.
(Replace Linux with your non-Windows OS of choice)
It'd seem sensible for Mono to use DotGNU's compiler to bootstrap stuff now it's working, although there are probably obscure reasons why they can't.
Re:Someone care to explain... (Score:3, Informative)
Traditionally, you compile by hand, which produces crappy but working code.. then you use the resulting compiler to re-compile, yielding clean code.
Re:Someone care to explain... (Score:2)
The first c compilers were written on a pdp-11 by K&R in a language called 'B', hence it's called 'C'
Re:Someone care to explain... (Score:2)
Re:Someone care to explain... (Score:2)
Re:Someone care to explain... (Score:2)
Lucky you if you have the tape interface
Re:C# is a nice language (Score:4, Informative)
I'm not sure Microsoft should be thanked for the greatness of the C# language on it's own, which I'm sure most of us agree is the best thing of
Thank Anders Hejlsberg, chief architect of the C# language, instead.
While I'm on the topic...
Anders Hejlsberg interviewed about C# [oreilly.com] #1
Anders Hejlsberg interviewed about C# [fawcette.com] #2
Pretty interesting, where he discuss the design goals of C#, how satisfied he is with what C# became, etc.
Re:C# is a nice language (Score:2)
Re:C# is a nice language (Score:2)
Cocoa apps in C#? (Score:3, Interesting)