.NET CLI Now Runs On Mac OS X
Oink.NET writes "A new tarball of Microsoft's Shared Source Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) is available for download. It builds and runs on Windows XP, FreeBSD, and Mac OS X 10.2. New in this release is Mac OS X support and class reference documentation. More details are available."
.Net will be as portable as Java within a few years. Wherever MS doesn't take .Net, the OSS community will.
.Net, I expect to see a lot of ISO C# implementations, optimized for various interesting tasks and platforms. Nothing about the ECMA C# spec requires IL (.Net's "bytecode"). Apple could certainly create an ISO C# implementation, call it Apple C# (MS released the name with the standard), have it natively compiled to PPC instructions, and have it use some combination of .Net APIs and Cocoa APIs.
.Net, is going to be less "pure" than Java (more variants) and ultimately far more broadly used.
With or without a full equivalent of
Other platforms could do likewise, if MS doesn't do it for them. I think C#, if not all of
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
i.e. is the intention that all of their future software will be layered on top ot .NET ?