.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."

Comments

.Net will be everywhere

[GCP]

.Net will be as portable as Java within a few years. Wherever MS doesn't take .Net, the OSS community will.

With or without a full equivalent of .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.

Other platforms could do likewise, if MS doesn't do it for them. I think C#, if not all of .Net, is going to be less "pure" than Java (more variants) and ultimately far more broadly used.

Re:.Net will be everywhere

[Melantha_Bacchae]

Yes, .Net will be everywhere. So will the operating system Microsoft is building on top of it. Why don't you all just hand Apple and Linux's marketshare to Microsoft now, complete with silver platter?

You were warned two years ago that Millenium was coming, and that it would attack Macs and open source machines. What part of "Embrace, extend, and extinguish." do you not get? The trial is over, we all lost, and Microsoft has become a monster. Keep the Borg JVM (.Net) off your Macs while the government is still allowing you the luxury of a choice. Otherwise your Mac *will* be assimilated, when Millennium awakens and devours the internet.

There is still some hope, and a battle royale to fight. The anger of Microsoft's customers, and the strength still left to Apple and Linux gives us a chance. Don't blow it by giving in to Microsoft's bait, and giving them a chance at gobbling up your Mac.

"At this moment, it has control of systems all over the world.
And...we can't do a damn thing to stop it."
Miyasaka, "Godzilla 2000 Millennium" (Japanese version)

To build, not to run.

[alias]

Those requirements are for the entire SDK, including the ability to build the source, not the minimum requirements just to run it.

The minimum requirements for just the .NET Frameworks redist are 32M ram on a 90mhz machine. See this page for more info. (Note: The bottom table, ".NET Framework Redistributable," lists the minimum requirements for the executable.)

Question for the readers

[beigeboy]

Does this mean that one day we can expect to see e.g. Microsoft Office running on FreeBSD?

i.e. is the intention that all of their future software will be layered on top ot .NET ?

Re:WTF!!! Can it be any more apparent?

[PythonOrRuby]

Well, they have to support FreeBSD, or they wouldn't be able to write software for their own webservers.

CLI is a joke

[anarkhos]

CLI makes it sound like it can support any language. However in order to use the C# API you have to use a C# compatible language.

It's like saying the ELF ABI can support any language.

And what can we expect from this common API? I don't expect much. It can't be any worse than the Java API (somebody please kill that abomination) but I still don't expect to be able to author applications which behave like Mac applications. For example it is impossible for a 100% Java app to behave like a Mac app.

If only Apple could reform Cocoa so it would have a genuinely platform independent file object then port the API to Windows. Java and .NET would be wannabes.