Portable.NET Now 100% Free Software

rhysweatherley writes "Finally after months of hard work and bucket loads of caffeine, the DotGNU community has finally got Portable.NET to the point of building our C# libraries on many Free Software platforms with our own C# compiler. This is a big deal! Portable.NET is now 100% pure Free Software, with no dependencies on third party C# tools. The compiler, which is written in C, bootstraps off gcc, so there are no icky 'how to compile the compiler' problems. And it's fast! The DotGNU team consists of lots of contributors, many of whom are coincidentially named 'Rhys Weatherley,' but this wouldn't have been possible without the support of the DotGNU community, especially the Weekend Warriors. .NET is not the only thing we are doing. We're playing around with JVM and Parrot (of perl6 fame) backends to the compiler. And we have a C compiler front-end that generates pure bytecode apps that can run on any decent CIL implementation (Portable.NET, Mono, etc). We are about 95% of the way towards our first milestone of an ECMA-compatible C# implementation. There are lots of things still to be done in the low-level C# libraries, runtime engine, and the compiler. So, if you have some time on your hands, and like messing with languages and stuff, like yours truly ... have look and maybe have some fun!"

Comments

Re:.NET for Linux

[xswl0931]

You just described Linux!

Re:DotGnu and Mono

[manyoso]

Because of Mono's affiliation with Ximian and its commercial interest some developers are precluded from participating in the mono-hackers development mailing list. Specifically, if a Mono developer is also associated with the DotGNU project or expresses an interest in Portable.NET, they are no longer allowed to participate in the mono-hackers mailing list.

Re:Cool

[arivanov]

Nope.

First, they are trying to do a full ECMA certification for NET and make it standard. In order to do what you are saying they will have to withdraw from the certification standard which immediately gives them a serious disadvantage in the war against java which is what this shit is about.

Second, deciding to apply for the certification process they have taken into account that making the language a standard will create alternative implementations. Not just GNU. There will be commercial ones as well. And that is the idea. Because there is something that makes .NET always faster then java if implemented properly on intel architecture. It is the fact that it is a little endian standard while java is big endian. Assuming everything else equal .NET will always win. That is besides the fact that many third llparty developers will actually prefer to deal with an ECMA standard language then with a Sun standard.

This is the idea of .NET. Sink Java. And so far it is proceeding very well on target and on schedule with the help of the GNU community. Nothing bad about it, I hate java so any means of killing it should be cherished and supported. The problem is that after sinking java MSFT can deal with competitors on their own turf exactly as you describe and we will be back to square one where we began. To perl and python as the only "portable" languages.

Re:woohoo

[wd123]

Every night at about 1am I embrace myself, and I definitely extend. I never knew Microsoft felt so good!