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Mercury Researchers Explain Microsoft .NET
Bob.Smart writes "Microsoft's .NET is clearly explained in
this article on the Mercury web site. The input from various important research
groups is also interesting."
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.Net is built on an open source protocol SOAP. which enables anyone to write his own version on any language he please. It wouldnt be long before someone build the .Net framework for different platforms like Linux or Unix. Microsoft is just trying to pry the control out of Java's cold dead hands. It makes sense too.
.Net holds up against Java.
The world is not gonna communicate in pure java. Its not about one language, its all about interoperability across platforms. The Framework is pretty flexible so as to allow anyone to write the same framework for any platform and it wouldnt be too late before someone does.
Microsoft is attacking both Sun in its Server market (by pushing Windows 2000 Advanced Servers) and Java in its pedestal by pushing forward the notion of interoperability through diverse languages using the same framework. It would be interesting to see the benchmarks.
SOAP got me all warmed up, and I am looking forward to see how
Rapid Nirvana
There is little difference (in terms of open-ness) between Jikes (or JPython) for the JVM, and Mercury for
Jikes is free software (GPL I think...?) translates it's language (Java) into the platform's implementation language (java byte code). JPython is the same, but for a different language.
As far as I could tell, that is all that the open-ness of mercury will give you (unless you're actually interested in the mercury language).
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Like Mac OS X doesn't have a hefty hardware spec? Something like a top-end G4 and 128Mb as a bare *minimum* ?
"Life is like a sewer - what you get out of it depends on what you put into it" - Tom Lehrer
Looks like someone was at the ASP/VB/C++ Connections conference in Phoenix.
Karma: Non-existant. Due mostly to the fact that you smell funny and nobody likes you.
For some reason, though, people continue to use sendmail and procmail, both of which use configuration languages whose syntax is decidedly nontrivial and nonobvious. Moreover, people continue to invent new programming languages with take-offs on well-understood existing syntax.
> Also, you can do full inheritance, etc. AMONG THE DIFFERENT .net languages.
> Write a form in C#, inherit it in VB, modify it, inherit the interface back into C#.
Have you ever looked at Borland Delphi and C++ builder !?! They ave been doing this for ages ...
Unless you want to count our assumption that lines are terminated with "\n".
.net isn't available for other platforms, its useless.
We don't even rely on that. I can't imagine 70% using a native API either. Whatfor?
We develop a large applet/servlet app in IBM's visualage on windows, which will be deployed within netscape (applet) and unix/jrun (servlet), talking over Corba to mainframe-PL/1 programs.
We can move from development (visualage/windows) to deployment (unix/jrun) without any problems or changes. The platform independence really is a crucial advantage.
As long as
Yes, Perl and Python are there. ActiveState was at the MS PDC. There's even a mailing list about it at ActiveState (though I've seen no traffic on it).
I can seem them all coming now, with COM and .NET, there is going to be an era of ORG jokes.
The technology is neat. I want to see what it looks like post-release.
Beta is bostonian for "Its Beta then Alpha"
heh
--jay
just a note, this mercury thing has been developed by the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science http://www.cs.mu.oz.au ( My faculty ) of The University of Melbourne. :)
The duality weakens
5. All languages are on equal footing. They all share the same GC
.NET,
.NET. Where is that link to the Linux executable?
Please direct me to the chapter in Stroustrup where it says that C++ uses a GC.
Why would I want to develop speed-critial parts in C or C++ when the program gets compiled into bloody byte-code for a VM?
10. With Java, you have to learn Java. Plus, statistics show that 70% of all Java
developers target APIs that are native to their platform. Thus, the "write once, run
anywhere" promise never comes true except in the most simple of situations. With
you can write in *any* of over 15 already-announced languages.
You're mixing up language-independence and platform-independence here. While I agree that language-independence and fast and efficient language mixing is a great thing, I've yet to hear of any platform-independence for
Besides, I seriously doubt that TogetherSoft's development tools qualify as "most simple"...
Cheers, patrick
--- The light at the end of the tunnel is probably a burning truck.
I think the cross-language features of the CLR are very innovative. I think a really interesting aspect of the CLR is whether Java (the language) will ever be supported on it. I'm sure Microsoft would love to support it, think of all the developers cut out of using the CLR otherwise! It would be quite a shame if the still pending Microsoft vs. Sun suit over Microsoft's Java implementation were preventing this from happening.
As far as I know C++ code will always be 'unsafe'.
I mean there will be no possibility to write 'safe' code even using managed C++. Managed C++ just adds extensions for garbage collected classes and such.
You can always implement any feature on the JVM, but it might not be very efficient, and it might not be very interoperable (that is, other languages and tools can't use it because they don't understand your implementation fully).
While the CLR doesn't support every language feature yet, it supports more than the JVM, and has a view to changing in future versions.
Microsoft is differentiating themselves from Sun by providing a multi-language product that changes, instead of a single language product that is very rigid (or solid -- depending on your preferences). Both had pros and cons, but for 3rd party language folks and researchers CLR is much more attractive in theory (but of course success of it as a product when launched is a factor).
Well, you're wrong. C++ that is compiled to run on native processors is generally unsafe but security is traded in for efficiency, but there isn't any 'unsafety' built into the language.
There are a few C++ interpreters that use a byte-code virtual machine similar to Java that are just as safe as Java (in both cases, you have to assume the VM programmers did a good job on implementing the security sandbox).
Of course, with interpreted C++, you lose efficiency vs compiled C++, but that's no different than with Java.
Sorry for vague posting. I tried to say that there is no way now for you to write 'safe' (in .Net terms) code using Microsoft C++ compiler which is available through http://msdn.microsoft.com/net/
even using so-called Managed Extensions for C++.
So, can anyone give me an objective reason why this is better than the JVM?
No objective reason, but a supposition...
Suppose they wrote a VM that doesn't use a stack for the registers and everything else. Wouldn't it scream? Stacks are actually kinda slow...
I got my Linux laptop at System76.
anyone with even less of a life than me (is such a thing possible???) should easily be able to find a list of international registrars and spend a few happy hours finding out.
What was the topic again?
~ppppppppö
If MS was able to get the Merc folks to cooperate, what about the poobahs of other languages? Have they been working on .net ports and we haven't heard about it because of NDA's. Were they approached?
Jonathan Moran
Oink, Oink!!
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
The reasons for the lack of working Java applets are simple: hubris on the part of Netscape and malice on the part of MS. When Java first appeared, Netscape thought they could write 22(!) different JVMs and have them all stay compatible, and easily updated when Sun updated the Java spec. Didn't happen. Then MS tried to hijack Java and basically killed the idea of easy applet portability.
Now that there are teams specializing in Java for different platforms (Sun does Win32, Solaris, and Linux/x86, IBM does IBM operating systems, Win32, and Linux, Apple does Mac OS and Mac OS X, etc.), the problems will sort themselves out. But the damage that Netscape did with their crappy implementations and MS did with their deliberate wrench in the works won't be undone for a long time, if ever. Java on the client is not doing so well, outside of in-house corporate applications.
Meanwhile, server-side Java is very, very portable. So, just start working on server-side Java and you'll see how good JVMs can be ;-)
-jon
Remember Amalek.
kuro5hin is already old, it sucks, and how do you pronounce it anyway?
Try this DotSlash.
The stack architecture in the JVM is an abstraction; when the JVM compiles to native code, values that should be in registers are in registers (and register coloring and other optimizations are probably easier to do with live profiling information). If you think of the stack as an infinite suppy of registers, then it starts to make more sense. Using a stack-based architecture lets the VM pretend it has infinite registers, and then the native compilation step does the Right Thing.
-jon
Remember Amalek.
Y'know, I used to think the same thing. Then I actually used X to run applications from n machines on my desktop. Terminal Server may be faster, but it absolutely does not have the same level of functionality. As for saving files on a 'core server'... I'm not entirely sure what you're referring to there, but I'd wager that a well-planned/implemented NFS mount scheme would serve the same purpose. Even better, actually - no drive letters to deal with. Oh, and have a look at the licensing terms for clients under terminal server... yuk...
Ummm... Oh wait... So, is this meant to be '-1 Troll/Flamebait' or '+1 Funny'????
Where the value of X-Mailer: is the true measure of a man...
Or would a .NET version of Python compile straight to .NET bytecode? But why bother when "normal" Python is already multi-platform?
For that matter, if your favourite minority language for any particular kind of task has been ported to all the OS/hardware combinations you use, what does .NET give you?
There's maybe a danger of significant development effort on your favourite esoteric language being diverted to making it run on .NET, that should be spent on improving the language itself.
--
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-- What do you need?
-- Gnus. Lots of Gnus.
In the article at Red Herring, on the second page, the interviewer asks:
Bill Gates replies:
No. No. Dot.net is a Microsoft platform. Just like the Windows platform... Don't anyone kid themselves into thinking that Microsoft is interested in playing nicely with others.
One way to lead is to walk in front of the marching crowd. When the crowd changes direction you can either run faster in the new direction and get in front again or you can stop claiming to be the leader.
The software industry "crowd" has changed direction. Watch Microsoft run to be in front again.
The article is here: http://www.redherri ng. com/mag/issue82/mag-gates-82-home.html
PS: When is this damn little textarea going to be tweaked to a reasonable size?
OpenSourcerers
Agreed - we have several large in house Java systems, I'm a lead developer on one of them. We use no JNI (which is what I assume is meant by "Native APIs") and our course is 100% platform independent. This evident by the fact we develop and debug on NT, then rollout to Solaris with no recompilation.
I love Java, Java rocks, Java has made my life happy again (and good riddance to VB & C++!).
But having said that,
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
Wait till they start holding data hostage. so you don't want to pay the new licensing fee? Here's how much it will cost to get your companies data back. ---
photosMy Photostream
BUT this code only gets run once -- to generate the interfacing code. A few methods get generated on the fly, then they get JITed and run as native code from then on.
So you need to implement an API to plugin to the ASP+, but that's just to interface ASP stuff to your backend, once the code is actually running it all runs as native and that API is no longer used.
I hope that explains it better. There is no per-call interface to go through (although you are doing stuff over the web so of course things have to be turned into representations suitable for sending over the network).
For web services you don't even need to do any of this, you just mark the service as a web service and edit some configuration files.
For embedded languages you just edit some config files to tell it where to find your compiler.
Only ASP+ needs "real" work to be done.
I remember that for the Inferno platform, the Limbo language was interpreted by the Dis VM.
The DIS VM has a CISC like design (memory-memory operations)
See http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/papers/dis.html
I'm wondering: has anyone compared the benefit of stack-based VM vs CISC-like VM vs other possible design.
It would be interesting to study the size of the generated code, the ease of applying performances optimisations,etc.
Does anyone has some URL?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Say again? We're writing a fairly heavy-duty AppServiceProvider-model application with JSPs and servlets hosted on IIS/JRun and I don't believe we've had any temptation whatsoever to use "native APIs" (whatever that is). Unless you want to count our assumption that lines are terminated with "\n".
Where did you get that 70% figure?
Among other differences, .NET supports multiple languages. The Java VM only supports uh... Java.
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I gave serious thought at porting my favorite language to the JVM. Others did. No way, the JVM is really tied to the Java programming model too much.
Oh this language is Dylan, so garbage collected, no access to the underlying hardware, much cleaner and higher level than Java.
An what do you know about the .Net security framework ? It turns out to be more powerful than the one in Java 2.
If you need more performance than what Java provides, you can do it by using unsafe accesses. But then your program is forbidden to run in safe contexts. Does signed Java code ring a bell ? Except than here there is no JNI BS to get performance, you can get most of it while sticking to the portable portions.
Yeah, just typing a brace or a semi-colon is bad enough! Come on, you don't hear the serious LISP users out there complaining about every parenthesis they have to type, now don't you?
If a language is worth using, the syntax is the least of your worries!
Oh, hold on, you just said .NET is a "wonderful and proven product which has been out for years". Dammit, I've been trolled ;)
.88 magnum -- it goes through schools.
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It's a
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It's a
-- Danny Vermin
Microsoft didn't come up with it. They just recognized a possibly good thing and are trying to be first on the bandwagon to adopt it.
What theese people have here sounds interesting. It needs to be studied more and explained better.
Besides, this thing _is_ GNU licensed. That's why I won't reject it out of hand and/or try to build a duplicate that is.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
I am proud to be an alumini of University of Melbourne Computer Science dept. There were (and still are) some great minds working there.
:-)
I came to know about Mercury at my 3rd year. I have always thought that is 'one of the cool research projects out of this world'
good to see the platform is spreading....
Netcraft, has a service to find web servers with addresses matching an expresion like "*.microsoft.*"
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
actually, someone at the conf. mentioned that you could do this. Pretty neat. We use a lot of Delphi for our product here (I do web stuff, don't work on the actual software) and a lot of guys really like it.
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DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
Right but the object model, data types, etc. is documented. All you would have to do is build your own. If you support the objects, methods, properties, and data types for those, it should work. As long as the program doesn't directly call the windows API (in other words, is completely .NET compliant).
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DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
My guess on MS's position on this is that java developers should just learn c#.
I also guess that 95% of code can be programatically ported between the 2 languages. (could be way off)
syntacticaly, there extremely similar languages. They just use different standard libraries.
The easiest approach to porting CLR to other platforms would likely be in reshaping Java's class hierarchies.
Anyone know how CLR's UI classes compare to swings hierarchy?
And those languages are C# (copy of Java), C++ (ugh) and VB (no comment necessary).
10. With Java, you have to learn Java. Plus, statistics show that 70% of all Java developers target APIs that are native to their platform.
That doesn't sound right, do you have a source? Most server-side Java is very portable.
With .NET, you can write in *any* of over 15 already-announced languages.
Languages for the Java VM.
If you actually want to speak intelligently about this, you really owe it to yourself to try it out.
Which I can't do, since I don't own any Windows systems.
The sad thing is, you'll be talking it down, when in fact, it's one of the coolest things I've ever seen in this industry.
It very well may be. But, at this point I don't see how anyone can trust Microsoft to put stability and sound architecture ahead of marketing concerns. Microsoft talking about standards compliance and cross-platform technologies has about as much credibility as Al Gore talking about campaign finance reform. Maybe in a year
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
So all .NET code is supposed to use the common type system? But isn't the differences among type systems one of the main reasons for choosing a particular language for a particular job? This sounds like "use whatever language you want, just be sure to smoosh it into the .NET paradigm".
The evaluation of an action as 'practical' . . . depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
You can't even quote from Sun webpages about this. How can you even begin to prove these outrageous claims?
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
The big difference is that it's from Microsoft, which means it will gain serious developer support, if MS doesn't screw up really badly.
.NET subscription fees from everyone.
It could be a huge boon to alternative OSes if all that nice Windows software was ported to a cross-platform environment. And why should MS care? They get to collect
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I've seen very little to say the Common Language Runtime will be cross-platform, although it shouldn't be too much harder to do than it is for the JVM. And as a standard controlled by ECMA, rather than a proprietary product like the JVM it's likely to happen
But .net isn't just the CLR. .net is also about SOAP-based 'Web Services', and from that point of view, .net's inherently cross-platform. Not in the 'sub main() runs on any platform' sense, but in the sense that your code running on the CLR can treat a Web Service exposed by, say, a nasty old legacy COBOL accounts program on a PDP, or a CORBA component on UNIX (check out this demo from iona.com, as if it were a COM/COM+ component running on Windows. Basically, thru SOAP, (not an MS-only thing), .net apps can not only be considered cross-platform, but actually multi-platform
Remember, .net is a lot more than just the CLR. At TechEd 2000 (byebye karma!), the two buzzphrases the MS guys kept using (and remember they were preaching to the converted) were 'The Web Won', and 'Data is XML is data is XML...'. I came away not just thinking cross-platform, but actually thinking 'so what is the platform now?
TomV
Please direct me to the chapter in Stroustrup where it says that C++ cannot use a GC.
.NET provides an environment in which you can use GC with managed C++. If you don't want it, don't use it.
If you want to develop speed critical stuff, then you could use unmanaged C++.
You should also realise that your precious C++ goes through various representations on its way to native code.
So how are you going to get your platform independence when you compile directly to native code? Hmm yeah, I'll just go to this site, uh oh, it's got an applet on it. I'll just download the source, check it for security issues, run it through gcc, etc... The world has moved on.
What would do serious damage to MS is more support and ports/rewites from _commercial_ software vendors but until they have a quick and easy interface to the GUI it isn't going to happen, they got lazy.
Bonobo & GTK (??) might be an answer, just guessing here, JAPH meself, not a real coder.
~ppppppppö
This distinguishes it from COM/CORBA where objects must be "marshalled" and "demarshalled" (i.e. serialised and deserialised) when communicating between different languages, even on the same machine.
As far as COM goes, this is in error. Marshalling is only necessary for inter-process calls. For intra-process calls, there is no marshalling, and very little COM overhead - even if the language is mixed.
Object Packager allowed you to wrap things in an OLE wrapper to allow them to be embedded.
Required: 5 years experience developing with Microsoft .NET
A few years ago when I was working on my MS, their head of Microsoft Research visited and asked our research group what he could do to help. They were extremely generous with software and documentation but as far was grants went they wouldn't even buy pizza let alone provide meaningful funding without specific strings attached. At one point they actually offered less than $2000 for code that took me an entire summer to write. Ugh...
Yup, and they gave IE away free for gods sake! why is everyone bashing MS??? (PS: for the hard of thinking, j/k) (PPS: altogether in fact, apart from the fact that it really needs more than my puny 128M of RAM W2K isn't that bad...) (PPS: ok ok I admit it I'm just going for the Greatest Amount of Karma Points Lost in 24 Hours world record)
~ppppppppö
Well that's funny. Last I heard, data encapsulation and the separation of interface from implementation were were things to strive for, not circumvent.
Here's a go.
Microsoft .NET is basically a virtual machine, kinda like the Java virtual machine. The virtual machine works with several different languages. This makes debugging and development easier than before.
Of course the big problems with virtual machines are that you get a performance hit, and your code will only run on those platforms which have an implementation of the machine. I'm not holding my breath for Microsoft to port the .NET machine to Solaris or Linux anytime soon, or to release the specs so that others can do it, either.
Basically, it looks to me like a Java ripoff.
Hope this helps.
The Tyrrany Begins....
Finding God in a Dog
However, there have been concerns that languages might still have to be chopped down to be implementable in the CLR. As an example of that, Eiffel supports multiple inheritance, but the CLR doesn't, and so Eiffel# only supports single inheritance. It's certainly possible to implement multiple inheritance on top of the CLR, as Python.net presumably does, but there's doubtless a performance penalty.
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Ok, as applications, as computing in general, becomes more distributed, I see this type of "Grand Unification" stuff going on. We are no longer in a world of standalone, network independent applications. We're not even in simple client server. As Sun puts it, "the network is the computer", We are in a many to many world, many clients, many servers, many pieces of code which are both, in an arbitrarily teired environment.
.NET matters: migrating a humongous amount of legacy code to this new unified network-centric world, making this migration as painless as possible for C/C++, MSVC, and VB heads, and those already sunk to the waist in other Microsoft legacy crap. If you're in a Microsoft-oriented world, well, yeah, .NET is some hot sh*t because it now allows you to join everybody else. On the other hand, if you are starting from scratch building some core enterprise infrastructure, I'd go with J2EE. It supports (embraces but doesn't extend or extinguish!) pretty much every important standard out there, and is quick to support new ones (e.g., XML). And there is a lot of Open Source support for Java-oriented stuff (Apache's Java and Jakarta umbrella projects for instance).
I'm a full-time Java programmer, so I think J2EE is an excellent "unification". You have everything you need: full featured, cross-platform applications, RPC via RMI or CORBA, "mobile code" via serialization and reconstitution on the other side, full-blown web application support, (pretty) seamless database connectivity, message-oriented middleware, network-aware device capability, Java on portable or embedded devices, myriad well-written libraries and projects under review for addition (generalized preferences, logging, assertions...)...it just goes on and on. Sun's one fault, if it can be considered that, which Microsoft seems to be trying to take care of, is support for multiple languages *within* the VM. Well, technically there is nothing stopping you from writing a compiler for a language that compiles to Java bytecode, but the VM spec and the Java language spec are in some parts interdependent. But I can't blame Sun too much for this...after all, their ability to control Java is what has brought us these solid standards and libraries.
Here is where I think
Ok, I suppose that's enough of a plug from me. I just wanted to give the perspective of someone who is already where Microsoft wants us to go tomorrow.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Hold on a second... I'm absolutely sure that Win95 and OS/2 were both in the works at the same time, regardless of who may have started "first". Remember, IBM and MS were in bed together for a long time, and OS/2, NT were the children for whom each took custody. I'm sure that MS already had something like Win95 in the works as soon as they parted ways with IBM, partly because they had been working on that kind of product for a while, partly because they didn't want to lose out to IBM with their own tech.
If my memory serves me right, OS/2 came out first, with a huge lead over Win95. But the day Win95 came out, no matter how big, bloated, or buggy it was, that was the day OS/2 died. And to blame that on MS is like blaming MS for Netscape's fall, too... if someone gets punched in the face by another person, and then they stab themselves to death, can't really accuse the other person of murder, right?
On the other hand, .NET is their big enterprise play, so hopefully they will be using it to fix their security partitioning problems.
Interesting, but I think that Microsoft's track record has been to favor added features over security.
I've whipped up some managed code with Python, so there's more than 3 out there, with more on the way. It'll just be another tool. Similar hype with Java, right?
-beme
-beme
1971
Also, you can do full inheritance, etc. AMONG THE DIFFERENT .net languages.
Sounds like a complete maintenance nightmare.
.NET differs from Microsoft's previous efforts in building cross-language component architecture (COM/DCOM). While COM (like CORBA) allows you to invoke methods/functions from one language to another, the common runtime allows data-level interoperability. The difference is that with COM/CORBA you modify objects through their interfaces, so everything is done via function calls (possibly many of them). In contrast, to modify an object in the common runtime you can just change it directly, since each language uses the same data representation, same address space and same garbage collector (when performing remote function calls the situation becomes more similar to DCOM or CORBA).
If you're not going to program to an object's interface, you lose the biggest advantages of using objects - modularity and maintainability. You're right back to the bad old days of changing one thing and breaking twenty other things. Sounds like the beginnings of a mess if you ask me.
include $sig;
1;
Actually that is not true,
There are compilers for many languages that produce java byte code and will run on the JVM.
Where does it say .NET will be cross platform.
I'd be very surprised if it is.
Tom
I have discovered a wonderful
Yup, stacks are a useful construct... I don't know for a fact, but I would guess gcc and other compilers represent a lot of stuff as stacks (expressions are almost a must) and then optimize and convert to assembly.
"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
In that case it would be:
koo-row-five-hin
Yep, I have seen scenarios like this, most often because a company adopted a propritary format in a vertical market. They are the only ones that know how to get your data out of their weird files, and the market is too small for anyone else to be motivated to break the system. Allows mini-monopolies.
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I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
In any case, the "n" is a syllable unto itself, as you'd see were "kuroshin" written out in kana instead of romaji, so it's "ku-ro-shi-n." (Apologies to everyone else for the pedantry; I'd like to think that I'd stopped the gratuitous displays, but "more learned than thou" types set me off.)
To answer your question, grade schools here mostly suck, because the government has an effective near monopoly on them. I'm doing my best to support people trying to fix that.
Hehe, well when bandwidth gets as fast as your PCI bus is today, it won't matter much, now will it?
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I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Most of business and a lot of life is a balancing act between stability and boredom on one hand and innovation and excitement on the other. The Brooklyn Bridge, DC-3 and Latin are very stable, useful tools. Fortunately, we have created alternatives to each. Development was challenging, interesting and sometimes scarey, but I'm glad it happened.
"It's Microsoft's groundbreaking new technology that lets any language call objects written in any other language!"
"Wow! So what's DCOM?"
"It's Microsoft's groundbreaking new technology that lets any language call objects written in any other language over a network!"
"Wow! So what's ALT?"
"It's Microsoft's groundbreaking new technology that lets any language call objects written in any other language so you perform do automation!"
"Wow! So what's an OCX control?"
"It's Microsoft's groundbreaking new technology that lets any language call objects written in any other language through controls that can be manipulated with a GUI tool!"
"So, what's
"It's Microsoft's groundbreaking new technology that lets any language call objects written in any other language through a virtual machine abstraction!"
Is it just me, or does Microsoft keep inventing the same thing over and over again trying to get it right? Soon enough .NET will turn out to be kinda like COM and DCOM and OCX but not really and then some hot, new, ground-breaking three letter acronym will come out and we will do it all again.
I'm a funny guy. I like it when things are thought out ahead of time so they can become a stable standard instead of yet-another-half-assed-attempt.
SOAP could be a good idea, but I'm not exactly sure that I like the security holes that it opens up. Counterpane points out that Microsoft's own security analysis faults SOAP for being able to "hide" protocol commands from firewalls. That basically means that you either prevent SOAP from at all functioning across your firewall, or go without a firewall. Granted, firewalls aren't the best security policy in the world, but I'd rather be assured that they'll work as advertised than have to worry about a brand new hole.
The Tyrrany Begins....
Finding God in a Dog
John Carmack fan, browsing at +5 since 1999.
Of course the big problems with virtual machines are that you get a performance hit, and your code will only run on those platforms which have an implementation of the machine.
This is only partially true. In a seperate interview on MSDN (no url, sorry I looked but is close) one of the .Net developers explained that .Net applications will only run slower the first time they are run; the assemblies will be compiled into the intermediate language at runtime. Because the compilation into the IL will take into account any special instructions the CPU (or video card, etc.) has, subsequent executions will therefore be faster.
- Rev.Unfortuntely, Mercury appears to be highly uninformed as to how the JVM vs .Net work. The JVM is first of all separate from a language. It can and does support other languages including COBOL, a Visual Basic implementation, Python, Perl, Javascript, and a host of others. The one major difference that makes the JVM not very suitable for languages such as C & C++ is that it has a security model that (intentionally) gets in the way. JVM code cannot access the underlying hardware, it cannot format your hard drive, it cannot infect you with a virus. These are all things that .Net is capable of doing. Plain and simple, Java is meant to be a secure web platform that is capable of running all the users programs without exposing them to unnecessary security risks. All M$ did is steal much of the JVM code for their vaunted C# and then expand it into .Net.
What does this mean to Joe Schmo? To put it simply, does anyone remember web-enabled ActiveX applets? I rest my case.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
No, they probably won't, but this platform on top of .NET will be. And since it will be, you can look at it and see how .NET works.
Maybe they'll try to cover that with other forms of IP, like patents. I don't know.
All I know is that I read the article, and my brain wants to shut down into 'your subconcious is thinking hard about something' mode. Something about it is intriguing.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
This is a little tongue-in-cheek... but maybe the reason MS threw money at Corel was to distract it.
.NET is! Let's write our apps in C# and port our apps to it!
You know Corel: always fascinated by the latest gegaw. Ooh, look at how sparkly Java is! Let's write our Office product in Java! Ooh, look at how sparkly Kylix is! Let's buy the company! Ooh, look at how sparkly Linux is! Let's port our apps to it!
And now... OOOOooh! Look how sparkly
Corel, with it's attention-deficit disorder, could very well forget that they've got a Linux project on the go. D-oh!
Like I said, slightly tongue-in-cheek...
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Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
Diskless workstations from Microsoft? When they put how much code on a hard disk for an OS install?
... and today's pet project has
Yes, yes it was.
That's why I called it my rant for the day.
My argument was that it's not worth constantly inventing new technologies, only to abandon them before they become stable. We should stick with older stuff (Java) for a little longer. It's a fairly general rant.
Microsoft is brilliant at stealing other's work right away from them (I'm not neccesarily flaming them for this, mind you). Look at how well they poisoned any attempt at operability with their extended Kerberos by distributing the specs for it, allowing thousands of geeks to crack and distribute it and then send out a few weak letters saying "now, stoppit...". I'm sure they only had to seed /. by posting it once or twice, and we did the rest of it for them. Now anyone working on compatibility has to be completely sure that their work won't be called into question, and that they haven't even glanced at the 'stolen' IP before writing code.
Look for more of this type of "hiding in the open" as Microsoft begins playing with open source groups and companies. Hopefully we've learned our lesson on that last one, don't go being contrary about their restrictions just because they say not to. You'll hurt yourselves in the long run.
Fist Prost
"We're talking about a planet of helpdesks."
Fist Prost
"We're talking about a planet of helpdesks."
-Jaron Lanier
I can do better.
Microsoft FuCKiNG sucks!! In every thing this corporation does, not one bit of concern is shown for the end user - unless it means more money, power, and control for Microsoft. Why do people keep falling for it?
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He lives in a world where those who do not run the client software of the omnipresent meme are unacceptable.
I saw a bunch of the .NET stuff at a recent conference. It's some cool stuff, and I was WAY impressed, especially on the ASP+ side, but as far as client apps, it's not a painless upgrade from vb6. Way different. This is in stark contrast with ASP+, which will run side-by-side with ASP pages (new file extension).
:)
.net languages. Write a form in C#, inherit it in VB, modify it, inherit the interface back into C#. Not only that, but when you run in debug mode in the IDE, it seamlessly steps into and out of the bits of code.
.NET language. Also linux, obviously.
Most interesting thing is definitely the CLR (common languange runtime). It gives common data types, and a (beautiful) common object model for system stuff. Also, common performance (it's the same runtime). As he put it "Microsoft (this guy wasn't m$) "Your language is a lifestyle choice" also "Microsoft has been putting 80% of it's R&D budget into it. If you think you can write better c++ garbage colleciton, go ahead, but early tests show even VB.NET and c#.NET written against the CLR outperforms the vast majority of C++ code today." Not sure whether I believe all that
Also, you can do full inheritance, etc. AMONG THE DIFFERENT
An old VB head had an interesting point too. By abstracting the API into an object model, it really paves the way for platform independence. After all, he said, if wrote a CLR for the mac, for instance, it would be trival to port a program from any
Anyway, those are my thoughts.
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DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
Microsoft is trying to take over all of Java's functions without using Java. Why would they put forth such effort to reinvent something which already exists and is in use by virtually everyone? Because Microsoft wants to control you, your future, and the world. It is time for an end to Microsoft.
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He lives in a world where those who do not run the client software of the omnipresent meme are unacceptable.
No part of the Java API has actually been REMOVED yet (except for the "private protected" visibility modifier, and I don't think that even survived beta). An applet written for JDK 1.0 will work just fine under JDK1.3.
I didn't know about the 22 VMs. Where did you learn that?
There were something like 22 different versions of Netscape for the different OSes (Solaris, AIX, Linux, Mac OS, Win16, Win32, xBSD, IRIX, HP-UX, I'm forgetting a few) and different hardware (Sparc, x86, MIPS, 68K, PowerPC, Alpha) Netscape ran on. There was no way to use any other JVM except for the Netscape one until the Java Plug-in.
Apple still gets complaints about the poor quality of Java under Netscape, even though Apple had NOTHING to do with the JVM, and has no way to fix it.
-jon
Remember Amalek.
This appears to be a way to get cross-language call compatibility without resorting to RPC ugliness like CORBA or COM/DCOM. Despite RPC protocol's attractiveness, they are bad solutions to the problems they purport to solve.
The 'R' in RPC stands for REMOTE it purports to solve the problem of calling a function in a different machine. Back in the early days of things like Xerox Courier, you would usually be using the same language at both ends.
CORBA is about DISTRIBUTED Object Based Computing. It purports to sove the problem of invoking methods in a different machine. They did this in a way that explicitly caters for different languages at each end, but that is not the primary objective.
The 'D' in DCOM stands for DISTRIBUTED, it is about doing COM between machines, and I would prefer not to talk about that.
RPC is inherently slow. It forces a process context switch, and it forces data to be mangled into a standard streamed format, and the worse thing is that it makes all this look like an innocuous simple function call. I've felt RPC was ugly every since I first saw it.
Doing anything between machines is slow compared with a function call. One reason why CORBA was invented was because old-fashioned RPC made you rewrite your code if you wanted to change which pieces were remote. The advance was to make it possible to get back some of the performance if the thing you were calling happened to be in the same place as you.
This takes a very different approach from RPC. Instead of literally sending messages to one another, languages hand eachother datatypes that they can mutually agree on the interpretation of. Much cleaner and quicker. A function call becomes a function call again. No context switch, no data mangling.
Except that if you want to be able to do "remoting" as MS calls it, you inherit from MarshalByRefObject, and all the stuff you hate comes back again. Fields and attributes automagically become methods (get/set pairs), and a whole stack of marshalling and transport stuff kicks in as soon as the object you are calling is remote. What looks like an access to a field of some object gets mangled into a streamed format, by default using XML which is verbose and expensive compared to your average RPC, but not standardised to that so you have no guarantee of interoperability (like CORBA before the customers screamed and screamed and SCREAMED and the vendors finally gave in and implemented IIOP).
Maybe we'll get back to the nice old days of C, FORTRAN and Pascal where you could call the other languages functions in the same address space.
If you want to limit your programs to one process in one machine then that's OK, but it is not what Microsoft are doing with .NET.
BTW, this is all a guess. The article is kind of vague.
The article is just one item in a mass of data about .NET that is sloshing around the web. The difficulty is in extracting information from that mass of data, acquiring knowledge from that information, and finally achieving wisdom in the light of that knowledge. Ill-informed speculation is the stone in your shoe as you tread that long and weary road.
Not only is it a question of multiple front-ends compiling to the same bytecode language, .NET allows multiple source languages to compile *with* this shared intermediate language.
.NET allows you to inherit from a Java class in C++, and then override a method of the C++ class in some object-COBOL code.
I won't speculate on the value of this to real enterprise application environments (frankly, I have no idea).. but it IS awfully cool.
CE to replace NT???? You are kidding, right?
Writing a new OS only for the 386 in 1991 gets you your second F for this term. - Prof. A.S. Tanenbaum, author of Minix,
Oh, so THIS was a troll?
Read the parent. That was the troll. Supid on-crack moderators. Probably some idiot 12-year-old...
I got my Linux laptop at System76.
Not so. Have you ever been to the University of Washington? They have a new EE building (largely fuinded by Micoro$oft). There is a new "Mary Gates Hall" (named after Bill's mom). I think Bill gave $12,000,000 to establish a new Genetics lab. How about Stanford? Gates hall is right next to Allen hall (Gates hall is just a bit bigger.
All those languages are interchangable?
.NET?
Seems to me like opening a pool full of bugs.
M$ compared to any *nix system is qua security a joke. (keep in mind that m$ get's big money for their product and *nix systems not)
So how do they fix (gnif gnif) the security problem considering the
And please, stop telling me they will fix it, cause they won't.
BTW. M$ has no monopoly, at least not if you think of using other systems.
sig. If Bill Gates got a nickel for every time w2k crashed,... oh... he does...
vinylat33
Specifically to the applets: the problem is the crappy implementation of the vm in netscape (they even could not write it themselves) and the distorted one in ie. browser vendors are at fault for not following the spec. imagine what would happen if not macromedia but someone else provides flash implementations for their browser/platform.. the applets could have been quite successfull but ms (with considerable help from netscape) killed them off. yet, I still have a swing applet running in netscape and ie using rmi. but it is jdk1.1 tied and pretty much at dead end.
You're confusing VMs and library implementations notably the AWT. Netscape did screw up the VM (that actually runs the bytecode) among other things by coupling it too tightly to the rest of their browser because they failed to understand that implementing a language runtime is really quite hard. This causes most of the crashes, especially when combined with glibc's rather over-sensitive malloc implementation. There are only small differences in VM implementations on different platforms (threading, mostly), and none of these should be user visible.
However, the cause of most of the incompatibility is the large number (actually its 3, Mac, Windows and Motif/Unix) of AWT and standard library implementations. Netscape tried to do it all themselves without licensing Sun's code. Given the speed Sun changed early versions of the platform at, that was fatal.
He's now retired from Microsoft. Hopefully Microsoft will soon put up a web site detailing what Project 7 was all about.
It's only a conspiracy theory, of course, but the suggestion was half serious.
CE is the only operating system that Microsoft has worked on (unless you count OS/2) which could be called truly "innovative". The only way that you can get Office (even if it is the cut down edition) to run on a palmtop is to use an OS with almost no bloat. CE has almost no bloat. All you need is a bloatless OS and the CLR and you have a nice framework for a new OS.
Besides, the issue as I see it is not "CE to replace NT", but "something new to try to kill off competing OSes". It might not be CE. CE would, after all, need some extensive modification (at the moment it is targeted to architectures without MMUs, for example) to compete. They might decide it's better to buy a company with a suitable microkernel.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
Stroustrup has always claimed C++ can use a GC, and it is almost true. There are conservative garbage collectors implemented by ignoring attempts to free memory, or regarding as mere hints, that will work both with C and C++. Its helpful to compile applications with a tendency to leak memory against these things, as it does reduce the problem.
However, most of the advantage of a garbage collector is that it saves developer time, and allows applications to have a structure more natural to what they actually do, rather than one twisted by the need to track memory usage, or by crufty reference counting schemes written by people who do not understand memory allocation (its rather a black art).
To be portable, C++ applications must assume they need to call delete, and that they need to take care of housekeeping. C++ programs written assuming a garbage collector are very unlikely to be portable. It must also be noted that conservative garbage collectors have rather poor performance characteristics compared to state-of-the-art GCs for languages without ad-hoc pointers.
Mercury is a research project at the University of Melbourne, not a company. The funding we got from Microsoft came with no strings attached.
.net. But it has also benefitted Mercury by enabling us to write a new backend with which we can easily target many other VMs, including the JVM, thus increasing the usefulness of our language.
Sure, it benefits MS to be able to say they have lots of languages supporting
BTW, did you get a trip to Redmond, Tyse? :-)
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
I'm sorry to be posting three times on the same thread, but what is the stance of the other imperative languages on this issue?
.NET bandwagon, but how are other lang.communities reacting to this?
I mean, Mercury and such-like (ie. functional languages) are eager/frantic to get on the
Not implying anything, just being curious...
He for got to mention the part where Micro$oft petitions to gain control of all .NET domain names.
BrianNo stupid nickname, just a pseudonym.
I think it's a little late for that scenario. You won't need to explain to the newest of newbies more than once that no hard drive = no storing stuff that the man doesn't want you to. Diskless workstations are going to go over like a led zeppelin, and MS knows it.
More likely they will attempt to end piracy of *their* apps by slowly phasing out physical copies. Certainly you won't need to install 800 megs of bloat in order to use office, provided you maintain your subscription all the popular apps will be piped on-demand to your screen. Maybe an operating system kernel that immediately connects to the net and updates itself and vital system files to the latest version, provided your account is still active. Think Microsoft Windows Update around the clock. Of course companies that choose not to partner with microsoft.net could very well be patented away from adopting the same types of schemes, and will continue to distribute there wares in a pirate-freindly, copy to the hardrive edition only.
Fist Prost
"We're talking about a planet of helpdesks."
Fist Prost
"We're talking about a planet of helpdesks."
-Jaron Lanier
*WHEW* That's a relief, I thought it was just a bunch of web pages filled with buzzwords
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end communication
Basically, it looks to me like a Java ripoff.
He answered the question crackhead.
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He lives in a world where those who do not run the client software of the omnipresent meme are unacceptable.
kew-ro-shun
ka-row-shun
--Giving to trolls for the benefit of us all
They can't support Java because of the lawsuit (and they've publicly stated this). .NET is much more than a VM... C# (or Perl or VB or C++ or whatever you want to use) runs through the CLR, which compiles your applications on the fly. I've seen the CLR used in several presentations now, and it makes a JVM look slow.
Just my two cents.
Wah!
What an interesting and Machiavelian interpretation of that little incident. You might even just be right. :-)
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Jesus Christ, I SWEAR I previewed that before posting. I SWEAR!
- Rev.
Maybe thats why their comming out with c# as well.
A couple things that I feel should at least be put out in the open:
.NET has been in development for over 3 years.
.NET application at http://www.ibuyspy.com/ where it has been running without fail for approximately 6 months.
.NET, you can write in *any* of over 15 already-announced languages.
1.
2. You can visit a sample
3. You can download the pre-beta SDK and develop in three languages *today*, and it all just works. I've played with it extensively.
4. The Common Language Runtime compiles only the functions that are called, and it uses an optimizing compiler to do it. When other functions are called, they are compiled just-in-time (saves a lot of system resources).
5. All languages are on equal footing. They all share the same GC and debugging features. You can spawn threads in VB just as easily as in C++.
6. You can inherit a VB class into C# into C++ and back into C++ if you want to.
7. Everything is strongly typed...no more figuring out what kind of string that function in C++ expects. Just call it natively. It just works.
8. The Common Language Infrastructure (which includes the CLR) is being submitted to ECMA (a standards body).
9. So is C#.
10. With Java, you have to learn Java. Plus, statistics show that 70% of all Java developers target APIs that are native to their platform. Thus, the "write once, run anywhere" promise never comes true except in the most simple of situations. With
11. Although I could go on, I have to mention that it just kicks major ass.
If you actually want to speak intelligently about this, you really owe it to yourself to try it out. Or, you can complain that the ".NET" term doesn't make any sense, thus, because of that severe brain blockage, you can't actually talk about the technology and its merits, because you've never even given it a chance.
The sad thing is, you'll be talking it down, when in fact, it's one of the coolest things I've ever seen in this industry. Linux or not.
It's type safe.
As this is Microsoft's boy they build the OS itself around it and gain speed speed speed.
I'm sorry if you wanted a longer answer, that's about it - really.
Microsoft's local transparency pseudo-CORBA thing has been done in Java; and everything else listed there has been done in Java too.
--Giving to trolls for the benefit of us all
Almost each every post that went in about .NET has been focusing on the technological merit and only that. While I am not surprise about this on /. I was hopping that we can see beyond this fact.
.NET you will see that it is based on XML and most of all that MS Office suit is being enabled to support XML -- not just by means of documents but by means of Office's components. That is, Office is being fine-tuned to run over the web by providing API using SOAP. By doing this, MS will soon open up Office to systems other than Windows. So imagine, being able to access Office components from your PDA or Linux box by simply having to support SOAP.
.NET the key difference is that you don't have to re-write your applications to enable them over the web -- Java requires a re-write.
.NET, MS is also enabling the OS and it's services (SQL, IIS, etc.) to be part of the .NET family. So expect to interact with the OS and it's services via SOAP.
.NET doesn't require a re-write; it simply requires an add-on to existing software to become part of the family.
.NET, MS will not enable its OS as well as its application over the web -- it will now have the potential to make its OS the back-end system that runs the web and its applications the front end system that uses the web.
.NET is ready for prime time MS's technology will be the invisible tool for everyday activities -- Java, Linux, Unix, etc. would start to die out unless if SUN, et. al. have a counter plan to stay in the market. And how is MS doing this? No it's not C#, or VM, etc. It is XML as its underlying tech.
If you look hard at
Yes, the idea is similar to Java, if not the same. However, with
Beside, the Office integration into
What does this means as a business strategy?! It means that MS will achieve what Sun and Oracle were trying to achieve years ago. MS has a better chance of achieving this simply because: 1) they already have the market, 2) there product is everywhere, and most of all, 3)
To sum up, with
In short, once
-- George
Karma stuck at 50? Add 2-5 inches.. err.. 2-5x Karmas Count to your pen1es.. err.. Karma all naturally and private
... and I mean real standards, as in implementation-independent specifications generated and approved by real standards bodies.
.NET does not qualify here, and won't as long as you have to say "Microsoft .NET" to be completely correct.
.NET.
Java does not qualify here, and won't until Sun turns at least the core of the language over to a non-vendor-controlled standards body (ISO, IEEE, whatever).
The other obvious cross-platform web choices (PERL, Python, tcl/tk) don't qualify here either. Definition by portable implementation is not sufficient - it can't handle questions like whether JPython and Python are the same language.
A major web project in my company evaluated all of the above as potential platform choices, tried all of them, and chose...
Common Lisp. True, it has no standard socket API, but the rest of the language is controlled by an ISO specification, so it's by-God cross-platform, cross-implementation portable. We have rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty, as opposed to the shifting sands you get with rapidly evolving/mutating systems like Java and
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
First of all the Java Virtual machine already supports more languages then the MS virtual machine. So far the MS virtual machine supports only c# and some derivative of eiffel.
Not really. In fact, microsoft decided to stop supporting its IActiveScripting Interfaces (perl5, VBscript, JScript) in place of the CLR. VBScript has grown up into VB.NET, and it's really becoming interesting (my most frequent complaint against VBScript was against global var scoped. This has changed to block scope).
on MSDN, there's a interesting paper about fujitsu`s cobol for .net... they supply an Active Server Example... Just try to figure COBOL code within an HTML page with server-side extensions :]
www2.hursley.ibm.com/tc39/mins-28sep00.html has some minutes of a ECMA meeting that talks about the standardization of the CLI and C#. Obviously we don't know what they mean by open-source and it isn't clear whether they want to release their non-Windows implementation, but I think there's nothing in the platform itself that is Windows specific. The apps written on it might be a different matter.
I think the important thing to do when trying to guess Microsoft's motives here is try to understand how they are trying to improve on Sun's offering. And remember that Microsoft might not care too much about giving away a platform that runs on all OSs (after all, Windows earnings aren't the cash cow they used to be) if it means they can make money on the platform.
Of course this is looking on the bright side, perhaps their plan is much more nefarious and evil in intent. My point is simply that because Sun has been a bit closed and static with Java and the JVM, perhaps Microsoft has something to gain by being open with the CLR.
Oh, I know this, but it's often not used to distribute things beyond the bounds of the machine it's running on.
Besides, CORBA and RPC are horrible protocols for doing that as well, though I will admit that .NET is not a solution. Also, if .NET turns that into even more verbose XML, that's even worse, though not that much worse (except that XML is a much bigger pain to parse).
My main problem with RPC is not its verbosity, it's latency. There's a hard lower limit on latency. That limit can be reduced, but as I like to say, the speed of light is a constant.
Yeah, I'm too busy doing other stuff to take the time needed to collect all the information about .NET. I wish someone would and actually tell me what it is. This vague cloud of Microsoft sponsored hype is unsettling.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
One word (okay, acronym): WFC.
The Windows Foundation Classes are packaged with Visual J++, and they are completely platform-dependent. I work for a company whose whole product is deployed using WFC, and I guarantee that it cannot be ported to ANY other platform.
From the MSDN:
The following table lists the general run-time dependencies for any WFC solution. Only those dependencies that are not installed as part of the base-level operating system (OS) are listed.
Dependency Minimum versionMicrosoft Virtual 5.00.2922
Machine for Java
WFC class library 1.00.8211
Comctl32.dll 4.70
Oleaut32.dll 2.30.4261
Olepro32.dll 5.0.4261
Ole32.dll 4.71.2512
In summary, the minimum run-time platform for WFC is:
Elsewhere in the MSDN, however, Microsoft pretends that it is a "pure" Java implementation. I will admit that Pure Java through v1.1.4 will work on the MS VM, but they have apparently dropped support for any later versions Java and J++.
.NET is Microsoft's second attempt to kill Java. They couldn't do it from within, by polluting it and trying to tie it to Windows, so now they're attacking from outside.
P.S. I'm not the AC who started this thread. I just think he's right!
Right...
.NET seems like a great idea. More exactly, I think the CLR is a wider implementation of the JVM concept started with Java. But, reading the posts here, I still have many many doubts about it (or maybe I should read more about .NET).
People talk about how it is better than Java because it lets you use any language of choice. And over this statement rise most of the questions... for people reading this, most of the time here I am talking about Java the platform, not Java the language.
First, I think the power of Java is not on the language itself, the JVM or the portability. I use Java to do my everyday programming at work, and I like the language a lot (I tend to see it as a "clean" C++). But what really is great about Java is the platform around it. The Java Class Library is just plain incredible and powerful (and I use just a tiny portion about it). How do .NET compare in this context??? What kind of "standard library" does it provide? Or is it "hey, you got CLR, the rest is up to you"?
Please note that being able to access the Windows API (or any other native API) does not count on this matter (here the "cross platform" argument comes to mind).
Also, another thing that is cool in Java is the great load of applications built around the platform, applications that are available *now* for anyone to use (and many of them at no cost except your internal development and deployment). Things like servlets up to entire application frameworks (take a look at Turbine) are really interesting.
Also, about performance... from what I understand, with .NET, although you can use any language you fell like using when you stand up in the morning, every compiler generates a bytecode that is understood by the CLR (just like the Java compiler does). Being that way, writing in "Managed C++" (new Microsoft jargon?) will not give me the same performance as writing a "native" C++ application. Thus, although this will easewthe development using different languages, won't this kind of "cripple" the good sides of different languages? Java suffers from this, specially when you talk about client (GUI) applications (it's a monster on the server, provided you have enough memory).
Another thing that comes to mind is something I read on the first stories about C#, saying that every C# object would be a COM object (just like inheriting from "Object" in Java). Isn't COM a "Windows only" technology?
Now on a different matter... just exactly what makes .NET so revolutionary as some people point? Is the JVM design flexible enough to accomodate different languages (JPython comes to mind)? Or is there more about C# than just a common runtime based a bytecode interpreter, and compilers for different languages that can understand it?
The idea is quite interesting (although I think mixing many languages would be a real mess on a big project :-) ), but, just what is so new about it, aside from the fact that Microsoft seems to be making something right after all?
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Marcelo Vanzin
Marcelo Vanzin
So what would the differences between .NET and JAVA/JVM's be, other than that Microsoft can't exert a monopoly over Java? ;> Besides, I have a hard time believing they'd make anything easy for anyone programming on a platform -other- than an MS OS..added to the fact that it's another MS standard that other OS's are now going to be forced to support, security flaws and all :>
The serialization inherent in RPC will still be there, perhaps behind the scenes, but there nonetheless. The reason being that it's usually necessary when making calls across a network to transport the data to the remote machine, hence the 'Remote' in Remote Procedure Call. :)
I agree however that it should help to simplify the nasty problem of passing data between components developed in different languages. If it works as well as MS would have us believe, this may be one of the more significant developments to come out of Redmond in a long time.
A Dick and a Bush .. You know somebody's gonna get screwed.
War is necrophilia.
I too fail to see how my question is insightful- *shrug*
At this rate I could be a real karma whore if I post more insightful questions such as ... Can someone please explain (in plain English) what the whole meaning behind the Natalie Portman and hot grits posts are about? ;-)
And why should MS care? They get to collect .NET subscription fees from everyone.
That alone sounds like a damn good reason to forget about this thing. I'll stick with Java for now. Don't like feeding the MS beast any more than necessary.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
This appears to be a way to get cross-language call compatibility without resorting to RPC ugliness like CORBA or COM/DCOM. Despite RPC protocol's attractiveness, they are bad solutions to the problems they purport to solve.
RPC is inherently slow. It forces a process context switch, and it forces data to be mangled into a standard streamed format, and the worse thing is that it makes all this look like an innocuous simple function call. I've felt RPC was ugly every since I first saw it.
This takes a very different approach from RPC. Instead of literally sending messages to one another, languages hand eachother datatypes that they can mutually agree on the interpretation of. Much cleaner and quicker. A function call becomes a function call again. No context switch, no data mangling.
Maybe we'll get back to the nice old days of C, FORTRAN and Pascal where you could call the other languages functions in the same address space.
BTW, this is all a guess. The article is kind of vague.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
WTF? The question gets modded up "insightful", the answer nothing? I'm assuming you posted with a +1. I may be drunk, but geez...
Planning to be moderated ± 1: Bad Pun.
Please define "winning technology".
.NET has its good points, but it's hard to imagine MS suddenly pulling its collective head out of its collective ass and pulling out a plum (sorry to mix metaphors). Any technically "winning" features will likely be weighed down by the awkward expediencies of the marketing and legal departments.
Is a winning technology one which takes over the market because of the monopoly position of its owner?
Perhaps a winning technology is one that forces all other competing technologies to be viewed as "losers"?
I would say that a "winning" technology (in the traditional meanings of "win" "lose" in the Geek lexicon) is one that makes doing "The Right Thing" easier and more "right". I don't doubt that
Lets face it: not everyone hates Microsoft. Of course, not everyone has had to live with Microsoft in their world long enough to hate them, either. I'll tell ya one thing tho': more than Bill Gates, I hate his army of drone-like apologists. Wannabees to a man.
Ya know, you have a point there!
.NET will improve faster and offer more than Java. On the other hand, if Java gets adopted by the open source community, it could more quickly evolve and offer whatever features programmers and end users need from it.
One of the main reasons for Sun keeping a tight grip on Java is so that MS couldn't embrace, extend, extinguish. (Other than, perhaps Sun making sure that everythig gets optimized for Sparc/Solaris as much as for Intel/Windows, or perhaps more).
Anyway, Sun now has no reason to worry about that, because MS will be ignoring Java from now on. There is a chance that
Microsoft invited programmers from Melbourne to Redmond without having them sign contracts; only a NDA which is commonplace in any software company. So, from now on, if I catch anyone else blindly claiming that Microsoft is evil, I will show them this evidence!
One argument that Microsoft is evil is that they "tainted" Sun's Java source. The truth is, they optimized it for speed and performance. It seems that Microsoft was only trying to take Java in the right direction.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
There's an accessible description of .NET in the MSDN magazine.
And, with applets, the VM depends on the user, but there is no way for a user to automatically download a new VM if his is uncompatable. And there's no way to check for compatability, either (one of the bigger flaws in Java, IMO). So you are stuck with Java PlugIns that have to be kept up to date and hope that deprecation hasn't removed anything you need to run an older applet.
As for just "broken applets," the problem is probably with developers giving up or just not testing them on all platforms. There is no reason an applet is less stable than an application for a given VM. I didn't know about the 22 VMs. Where did you learn that?
Planning to be moderated ± 1: Bad Pun.
I think this would be a tremendous boon for free software.
I know many people who would be much more likely to try out Linux/Star Office/Gimp etc. if they actually had to pay for the software that they use.
If MS's tactic is to allow piracy until they own the market, then try to stop the pirates and soak up the profits, it may just backfire on them.
It's a feature, not a bug ...
.NET is their big enterprise play, so hopefully they will be using it to fix their security partitioning problems.
Part of the reason for SOAP are those pesky firewall administrators that refuse to allow RPC clients to work with Internet servers. Smart Firewalls that could filter SOAP are a 'solution' if only because most places won't bother implementing them.
Not that is necessary a huge problem -- we've already got a number of other protocols running on port 80, so why not another. The real issue is Microsoft's implementation -- If they muck it up as badly as they mucked up ActiveX/COM, they you might have real problems with SOAP-aware ILOVEYOU viruses and the like. On the other hand,
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Meanwhile, there already exist cross-language network object-model environments , some of which support far more languages than Mercury mentions .NET supporting. No, GNOME isn't VM-based, and for good reason; however, it doesn't need to be to support C, C++, Objective C, Perl, Python, Guile, Ruby, Ada, Eiffel, Dylan, Pike, Pascal, Haskell, et al.
Disclaimer: I'm a former Mercury developer. I left the project before Microsoft approached the Mercury guys, but after a fairly scary dinner with James Plomondon, whose job title at the time was "Principal Java Evangelist, Microsoft Corporation". It's a long story, which can be told some other time.
Anyway, .NET has, as part of the system, a common language runtime (CLR) for different programming languages (and I mean very different programming languages; C++, ML, Perl, Haskell and Mercury are about as mutually different as languages can get). This distinguishes it from COM/CORBA where objects must be "marshalled" and "demarshalled" (i.e. serialised and deserialised) when communicating between different languages, even on the same machine. With .NET, different languages use the same binary layout and so can just share the memory.
This represents a unique opportunity for language researchers to get their language used. Software is increasingly being written based on a component model, but implementations of technologies like COM and CORBA impose a significant overhead when moving from one language to another. The .NET system means that you can mix and match languages without the associated performance impact. If you think it's easier to write your GUI in Java, your AI engine in Mercury and your time-critical data logging stuff in C++, you can do that, and you don't pay such a huge price for the mix. This means that programmers can try out new programming languages in their projects without having to go "all the way".
The Open Source community must take note of this! Admittedly we haven't seen much in the way of actual technical detail about .NET yet, and Microsoft's implementation might turn out top be hopeless, but the CLR is a good idea.
And now, the obligatory conspiracy theory for the day: As operating system kernels get smaller, moving data between OS components efficiently becomes trickier. The Hurd uses the Mach IDL, which is not unlike the CORBA IDL only much more lightweight, to marshall and demarshall data for the various components, for example. The CLR might represent the first part of a new operating system from Microsoft; one which will eventually replace NT, because it provides a way to build an object oriented OS in multiple languages without the serialisation costs.
Microsoft already has a suitable microkernel which could support CLR. It's called Windows CE.
They also have a motive. As we all know, Microsoft only "innovates" when they're trying to kill off competition. (For example, IE to kill off Netscape, Win9X to kill off OS/2, NT to kill off Netware and other similar systems.)
Watch carefully.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
You thought diskless workstations sucked in the past? Just wait until MS builds one.
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I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Well, if someone else had it they would get sued for trademark infingment. I dont really expect someone to register microsoft.net and actually put it to good use. The companies dont want people stealing impressions meant for them, so they rightly deserve the domain. You are right, they do not deserve all the TLD; but the truth is that they own the trademark and therefor have every right to own the other TLDs.
Buying a Dell computer is equivalent to dropping the soap in a prison shower.
Basically, it looks to me like a Java ripoff.
... just because it uses a VM? I don't get it. I mean, Java syntax is a ripoff of C/C++ but I don't hear too many people bitching about that.
Maybe the reality is that having a VM is a Good Thing (TM) when you have a lot of computing power. Now that developers don't have to worry about optimization so much, they can concentrate on making their lives easier. As a software engineering student, that sounds pretty darn good to me.
----- rL
The Intermediate Language used by the .NET runtime includes a "tailcall" annotation, so it's a great deal easier to compile functional languages without worrying about stack overflow. At Microsoft Research in Cambridge we're working on a compiler for SML that targets the .NET runtime and includes interop features similar in spirit to MLj. Watch this space!
- Andrew.
Now if you can go for first and get 0th I'll be impressed....
~ppppppppö
All it seems to me that .NET is just on big VM. What I found funny is that they kept on refering to it is like JVM but did not say it supports java. It did mention JScript but that is it.
This is neat.. this is cool.. this kicks butt.
Microsoft has a history.. a known for doing "bad things" and we have come to distrust them by default.
What is likely to happen..
This will rock.. it was work great on Windows.. This will then be ported to Solarus.. and work great (But no one will try it) It will be ported to MacOsX and then MacOs9 and work GREAT.. (But the Mac people won't trust it enough to try it). It'll be ported to Linux.. Linux people will poke at it but otherwise leave it for dead. It will be ported to Amiga and ignored.. It will be ported to BeOs and then called despret.. It will be ported to BSD and BSD people will say "Not on my box" it'll be ported to AthreOS and even they won't want anything to do with it.
That is what I believe will happen.
I beleive Microsoft will honnestly attempt to make a cross platform system.. premote it and push it.
If Linus or RMS had a reputation for writing bad code GNU/Linux would not exist today...
This platform dosn't have much hope.. it dosn't matter how good or how cool it is.. It's masters have a really bad reputation and the computer world isn't going to forget that anytime soon.
To bad... this looks like it could be neat...
Maybe make yet annother language module for GCC core to go with all the other modules and that would pritty much handle your porting to all the diffrent platforms...
(PS no I'm just highlighting irony.. They aren't the same thing.. But like the diffrence between a motercycle and a truck the both get you from A to B reliably)
I don't actually exist.
Instead of "Where do you want to go today" M$ should adopt the Everquest/Sony logo "You're in OUR world now" More fitting considering this .NET crappola.
Teamwork is a bunch of people doing what I tell them.
You CAN target JVM with other languages. However to do so, you have to do everything the way Java does it, and that can mean your language is slow, or bloated, or both.
If you check out the list of languages that target the JVM and ask them for their complaints, there will be tonnes of issues. .NET tries to
address some of the top complaints in this platform. By-ref parameters, tailcalls, value types and metadata are the main differences. Also defining a common subset of the type system
(CLS) is a big step between library interop.
If you still think the JVM supports other languages, consider this example of support: Do you get source linked debugging of your language within any Java IDE, just by targetting the JVM? You get that with .NET, regardless of what language your source is in.
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Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
While Derek Burney didn't have a whole lot to say of substance to CNBC's Bill Griffeth, he did have the following nugget when it came to Linux, Microsoft, and .NET:
"As we looked at moving our applications to the Web, it became clear that .NET is the way to go. By incorpoating .NET servicves into our own applications, including Linux, we can strengthen them."
In the course of every project, it will become necessary to shoot the scientists and begin production.
ML programs are hard to compile to Java bytecodes, since Java functions aren't tail recursive. There exists ML to Java byte code compiler (MLj) but it suffers from this limitation. The MLj Compiler
I also question the need to abandon platform independence in order to get some perceived language independence. MS has absolutely no motivation to implement an architecture that would provide BOTH language independence AND OS indepence and guess what JVM already does that!.
Of course all the MS shops will use
A Dick and a Bush .. You know somebody's gonna get screwed.
War is necrophilia.
Contrasted with this:
They get done saying that you no longer modify objects through interfaces, and then turn around two paragraphs later and say that interfaces need to be implemented to support this? I don't understand. They just got through saying we DIDN'T need to call objects by their interface. Maybe I'm reading it wrong.
To me, it looks like MS is making a pot of stew with all the leftovers they've found around the kitchen. I think they're trying to be compatible with too many things and support too much, and I can't imagine you can do that AND have great performance, AND not have a buggy product.
Also, I'm worried for the security of such a beast. I believe you can do a lot by forcing it to run in a virtual machine. But I have seen MS in the past, and they tend to allow things to go beyond an envelope such as that in order to provide additional functionality. Unfortunately, this seems to open gaping security holes and tends to bite them in the ass rather hard.
But that cross-platform bit makes me wonder how any of this is an improvement over the JVM. Code for the JVM compiles to JVM bytecodes which are turned at runtime into native code. How and when this happens depends on the JVM (HotSpot, JIT, TowerJ, etc.), but the net result is the same.
People have ported other languages to the JVM (JPython being the best known example), and it's pretty easy to hook Java code up to DCOM (Take a look at J/Integra from Linar Systems). Granted, it sounds like MS added VM opcodes to .NET's VM to improve performance for languages besides C#, but that's just a nice addition.
So, can anyone give me an objective reason why this is better than the JVM? Or is .NET only MS' version of the JVM with C# being its version of Java?
-jon
Remember Amalek.
Can someone explain (in plain english) what .net is all about?
The real question is, how stable will it be? Every software vendor out there is rushing to develop new architectures, technologies, etc., but they don't spend nearly enough time testing. True, garbage collection should improve stability, but that's only if garbage collection is implemented properly. People are likely to just jump on the .NET ship and hope that it will cure all their problems.
.NET, Java is a mature technology, yet it's still not very good. I'd rather see developers put their energy into making Java mature and bug-free, even if .NET is technically superior (not saying that it is).
When will people realize that there is no silver bullet? More than all these fancy technologies and buzzwords, we need good software engineering and extensive testing. Customers share part of the blame for not shunning companies that produce crappy software. Capitalism only works if customers use their brains.
Here's a quick question for you: How many broken Java applets have you seen? How many have you seen that work perfectly? I almost never see Java applets that work perfectly (may be my JVM, but what good is the cross-platformness of Java if you can only get a working JVM for one platform?). In comparison to
This is my rant for the day. Yes, good architectures help, but good software engineering and thorough testing will always be most important. Too bad they aren't sexy enough to get the attention they deserve.
Yet another example of how immature the slashdot audience is. Microsoft has come up with a winnning technology here, it's going to be the future of computing as we know it. Just because its not GNU licensed and powered by Linux doesn't mean that we can't appreciate their work. Microsoft has plenty of programmers who have the same ideas as we do, and they're implementing them, better. If the Linux side of things wants to bash MS, they should at least find some real problem of theirs, such as Bill Gate's alleged affair with an intern, rather than bash a wonderful and proven product such as .NET which has been out for years and is succeeding beyond Microsoft's wildest dreams. MS's Windows Terminal Server performs over 30x as quick as XFree does, while providing even more functionality, such as a way to save files on Microsoft's core server with the touch of a button. Linux lovers watch out, the future of computing is already here, and its name is .NET
Shine on, you crazy diamond.
What this comes down to is that Microsoft is giving money to a research group and getting feedback on the language independent features of their runtime. That's good because it helps support programming language research, a chronically underfunded area. And if .NET ends up being a good, usable, open runtime after all because of the feedback, even better for everybody.