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Another .NET Language

Posted by Hemos on from the expanding-their-weaponery dept.

Wankers Anonymous writes "In an interview with David Simmons, CTO of SmallScript Corp., Learn about a new .NET language about to debut, the ins and outs of its creation, as well as some insider history behind the genesis of the .NET platform. "

1 of 34 comments (clear)

  1. Re:well done... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    CLR is the runtime library while IL is the Intermediate Language. You're mainly talking here about limitations of the IL.

    Effectively however these are criticisms that IL isn't high-level enough. Kind of missing the point; IL isn't designed to be high level - it's effectively an assembler code. Guess what? In assembler, you have to represent closures as objects. In assembler you can't implement CLOS primitives with much "efficiency" (number of instructions). CLR + IL define a platform which supports LISP + CLOS just as well as a raw CPU does; it JIT compiles so the speed of code is asymptotically more-or-less the same. And Allegro Common LISP is hardly a poster child for efficiency anyway.

    One issue with all this is that the JIT phase can slow down certain very dynamic programs. Python.NET has issues in places because of this. But that's the price you pay for using a bytecode. Java would have the same problem if it attempted to be as powerful and dynamic as .NET.

    However, I must agree that MS seem to have dropped the ball somewhat in their support of lexical closure. It is possible, but it's highly awkward, AIUI. However, these are not mainline features that Microsoft's market are demanding. What Microsoft is offering is a unified programming paradigm for Visual Basic, C++ and C#. Other languages are "nice-to-have", but hardly essential for 99% of the world's programming needs.