Posted by
timothy
on from the not-the-same-as-self-flagellation dept.
Bob Smith writes: "Miguel just commited the last patch nessisary to get Mono's C# compiler to compile itself. After 7 odd months, MCS is now self hosting."jbarn adds: "Mono-list email is here."
Request
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I ask that people submit more articles about accomplishments in the world of compilers. Does anyone recall the functional programming contest? There were many excellnt compilers featured that are being improved constantly, and/. should focus some of its attention on those, too. C# is getting too much attention just cause it's a microsoft thing...:)
Re:a dumb question
by
pthisis
·
· Score: 5, Informative
If the compiler can build itself, then people can work on improving the compiler without needing to have a different compiler to build it with.
In this case, until now you needed to have Windows and a C# compiler for Windows in order to work on the C# compiler for Linux--that would shut someone like me (who has no Windows) out from being able to do compiler work. Not that I want to work on C# anyway, but you get the point.
Imagine if all the gcc developers had to buy a C compiler to work on developing the free one!
Sumner
-- rage, rage against the dying of the light
Mono is does not depend on .NET
by
Carnage4Life
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Isn't it wonderful having C# and.NET on Linux, after all they won't have the problems that Samba boys have trying to keep up with MS deliberately changing things to stop them, and it won't be miles worse.
Dare Obasanjo: Similarly what happens if
Dan Kusnetzky's prediction comes true and
Microsoft changes the.NET APIs in the
future? Will the Mono project play catchup or will it
become an incompatible implementation
of.NET on UNIX platforms?
Miguel de Icaza: Microsoft is remarkably good
at keeping their APIs backwards
compatible (and this is one of the reasons I think
they have had so
much success as a platform vendor). So I think that
this would not be
a problem.
Now, even if this was a problem, it is always possible
to have
multiple implementations of the same APIs and use the
correct one by
choosing at runtime the proper "assembly". Assemblies
are a new
way of dealing with software bundles and the files
that are part of an
assembly can be cryptographically checksummed and
their APIs
programmatically tested for compatibility.
[Dare -- Description
of Assemblies from MSDN gloassary]
So even if they deviate from the initial release, it
would be possible
to provide assemblies that are backwards compatible
(we can both do
that: Microsoft and ourselves)
.NET isn't a revolution, its a way to build poor quality mainframes, lots of boxes, poor IO. I
No.NET isn't a revolution, it's simply a slight improvement on an old idea of how things can be done. The same way Linux, Apache, BSD, Perl, Java, XML, P2P, the world wide web, etc. aren't revolutions but simply new spins on decades old concepts.
However, does this somehow preclude their usefulness or the fact that they are all innovative in their own way?
Re:This might make it a bit more intriguing
by
image
·
· Score: 5, Informative
You wrote:
The cost of using soap means the XML has to use DOM and it has to validate the required nodes.
and:
Anyone working with XML knows that validating DOM structure can be very costly for complex tree structures.
SOAP does not use the DOM. The SOAP DTD can be validated without it. As can any XML DTD.
Yes, the DOM is heavyweight, but it is also totally orthogonal to this problem. Where did you get the idea that SOAP required a DOM, anyway? The spec you reference certainly doesn't say that, and they really don't have anything to do with each other.
Pascal was actually designed to be compiled in a single pass. Although literally executing a Pascal compiler by hand would take _ages_, you can use a high level language as a guide to hand-produce an equivalent assembler routine from prefabricated sections (ie macros).
But this isn't what Wirth did. First he had a student code a compiler in Fortran, but this proved unsatisfactory. He then worked for several years on implementations before finally coming up with what we now call p-code--a simple virtual stack machine that could be implemented easily in any assembler language then available. The bootstrap compiler generated p-code, and thus porting the language was reduced to writing a few simple low level i/o routines and a p-code interpreter.
I believe one or two younger readers may recognise this concept from a very popular modern programming language.:)
Re:Microsoft and "standards"
by
rabtech
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Is that why some 15 year old HP-UX boxen running some ancient version of samba can still talk to my Windows 2000 server?
I find it hilarious that you would accuse Microsoft of changing the API; SMB hasn't changed at all on NT/2K except for a few upgrades to the password scheme to make it more secure and a few other small patches to fix bugs.
What Microsoft did do is come up with a new and improved filesharing protocol, CIFS, and implemented it as a >separate library running on different ports. If you honestly believe they are going to totally change the way their server OS works and lock out Win9x/NT4 clients, you are sadly mistaken.
Similarly, the Win32 API hasn't ever been CHANGED... it has only had things added to it. And with NTVDM/WOW, I can still run my ancient DOS and Win3.1 programs (for the most part) under Windows 2000; tell me where they've changed the API here?
*ALMOST EVERY* Time Microsoft wants to make a change that would break something, they just implement it in a separate standard or New API rather than b0rking the old one, which is the way it should be done.
If anyone is spouting FUD and nonsense here, it is you.
Slashdot Mirror
I ask that people submit more articles about accomplishments in the world of compilers. Does anyone recall the functional programming contest? There were many excellnt compilers featured that are being improved constantly, and /. should focus some of its attention on those, too. C# is getting too much attention just cause it's a microsoft thing...:)
Miguel's Mono Roadmap
If the compiler can build itself, then people can work on improving the compiler without needing to have a different compiler to build it with.
In this case, until now you needed to have Windows and a C# compiler for Windows in order to work on the C# compiler for Linux--that would shut someone like me (who has no Windows) out from being able to do compiler work. Not that I want to work on C# anyway, but you get the point.
Imagine if all the gcc developers had to buy a C compiler to work on developing the free one!
Sumner
rage, rage against the dying of the light
Mono is not a clone of
Secondly as miguel said in my interview with him which originally ran on Slashdot and then on MSDN
No
However, does this somehow preclude their usefulness or the fact that they are all innovative in their own way?
You wrote:
The cost of using soap means the XML has to use DOM and it has to validate the required nodes.
and:
Anyone working with XML knows that validating DOM structure can be very costly for complex tree structures.
SOAP does not use the DOM. The SOAP DTD can be validated without it. As can any XML DTD.
Yes, the DOM is heavyweight, but it is also totally orthogonal to this problem. Where did you get the idea that SOAP required a DOM, anyway? The spec you reference certainly doesn't say that, and they really don't have anything to do with each other.
But this isn't what Wirth did. First he had a student code a compiler in Fortran, but this proved unsatisfactory. He then worked for several years on implementations before finally coming up with what we now call p-code--a simple virtual stack machine that could be implemented easily in any assembler language then available. The bootstrap compiler generated p-code, and thus porting the language was reduced to writing a few simple low level i/o routines and a p-code interpreter.
I believe one or two younger readers may recognise this concept from a very popular modern programming language. :)
Is that why some 15 year old HP-UX boxen running some ancient version of samba can still talk to my Windows 2000 server?
I find it hilarious that you would accuse Microsoft of changing the API; SMB hasn't changed at all on NT/2K except for a few upgrades to the password scheme to make it more secure and a few other small patches to fix bugs.
What Microsoft did do is come up with a new and improved filesharing protocol, CIFS, and implemented it as a >separate library running on different ports. If you honestly believe they are going to totally change the way their server OS works and lock out Win9x/NT4 clients, you are sadly mistaken.
Similarly, the Win32 API hasn't ever been CHANGED... it has only had things added to it. And with NTVDM/WOW, I can still run my ancient DOS and Win3.1 programs (for the most part) under Windows 2000; tell me where they've changed the API here?
*ALMOST EVERY* Time Microsoft wants to make a change that would break something, they just implement it in a separate standard or New API rather than b0rking the old one, which is the way it should be done.
If anyone is spouting FUD and nonsense here, it is you.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)