Why Doesn't .NET Include a Linker?

CrypticSpawn asks: "I read an article on Joel on Software it talks about Microsoft missing one important thing from the .NET infrastructure, and I wanted to know what Slashdot readers thought were Microsoft's reasons for leaving [a linker] out?"

Comments

One possibilty

[sbennett]

One possible advantage to always dynamically linking: when some nasty bug in the runtime is found, it should be easier to upgrade the runtime than to relink every application that's been linked statically to it. Of course, people won't actually bother to upgrade, but you can see how the theory goes.

Yes, I say when a nasty bug is found, and not just because it's a Microsoft product. No matter how good the software is, there's always at least one critical security flaw.

Re:silly objection, and- you can get a linker!

[kzeddy]

this linker shown above does nothing more than merge all the classes used by the application into one big assembly. it does not turn the code into native assembly or link into the assembly and mini hosting environment which is what joel is talking about. YOU STILL NEED .NET

How did this post get moderated up?

[Inoshiro]

All you had was wild speculation ending with, "I've never used .NET,"

Let's pause a second and see how programs work on a modern operating system.

There are 2 kinds of programs, typically, in an environment such as your PC: statically linked programs, and dynamically linked programs. Statically linked programs have the library calls included in the binary, wherease dynamically linked programs rely on library implementations stored in a system directory (like \windows\system or /usr/lib). The run-time linker resolves all the dependancies and loads the related libraries for every dynamic application you start (run the ldd command on a binary you have to see the libraries).

But a .NET program (or a Java program, or a batch file, or a shell script, etc, etc) isn't a binary. It's PCode. It requires an interpreter to parse its Pcode. To make the .NET program stand-alone, ala a statically linked binary, you'd need to include the interpreter, a set of all used class libraries, and any other parts of the environment that are required. A typical 1-3mb application would have to be distributed as a 30mb+ file.

When you want to run a Python program, you install a Pynthon interpreter. When you want to run a Java program, you have to install the Java runtime environment. When you want to run .NET programs, you need a .NET environment. It's not some crazy lock-in scheme, miyako, it's merely a fact of how virtual machines and Pcode work.

Before you sit down to learn about .NET, I think you should take off your aluminium beany and learn about how computers work.

Re:silly objection, and- you can get a linker!

[JDWTopGuy]

In fact you could make an installer that contains the entire operating system!

I believe emacs has something like that.