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Microsoft Common Language Runtime To Be Cross-Platform
axlrosen alerts us to a Microsoft sleeper announcement from Mix07: a version of its Common Language Runtime will be available cross-platform. The Core CLR shows up as part of the Silverlight SDK that Redmond is open sourcing. From the blog posting: "The biggest Mix '07 announcement made on opening day of this week's show was one that Microsoft didn't call out in any of its own press releases: Microsoft is making a version of its Common Language Runtime available cross-platform. The CLR is the heart of Microsoft's .Net Framework programming model. So, by association, the .Net Framework isn't just for Windows any more."
Yes, kinda, partially.
.NET Framework is, like System.Windows.Forms, and Microsoft.*.
My question is more like --
Will this aid Mono development? Is Mono still necessary? What about the Windows specific API's? A lot in
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
The summary got my hopes up. I like C# and .NET quite a lot, but I also like Mac OS and Linux. I've been trying out Mono and Monodevelop (as well as some Xcode plugins for C#/Mono), but they're really not a good match for VS2k5 yet. (I'm hoping that "yet" comes true and doesn't turn into "ever".)
Unfortunately, only the "Core CLR" will be ported, and only to the Mac OS (probably due in part to MS Office for Mac), not Linux, and not even older (PPC) Macs. I also seriously doubt there will be much in the way of developer tools for the(se) other platform(s).
Sad, really. Office and VS are the only two decent Microsoft products, and they refuse to port either of them to a decent platform (aside from the tiny fragment of Office that makes it to the Mac).
After playing with C# for a few months, the answer I came up with is that C# happened after Java and (I would hope) improve upon Java in some ways. But I stopped using it because of a few reasons. The first of which was the cross platform problem. While Java wasn't open source at the time, it worked on a lot of different platforms. At best you could implement .NET with Mono but there was no guarantee that a change by MS would not negate the hard work of the Mono team. The second reasons is that MS has always been long on promises about technology and short on execution. I'm content to let some else be the guinea pig.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
"Silverlight will plug into Internet Explorer, Mozilla and Safari browsers, meaning the slimmed-down CLR will run on these platforms, as well."
When a browser became a platform I'm not sure, when they started handing out the Web 2.0 Kool-Aid I suppose. It doesn't mention Linux so I reckon they mean Firefox on Windows.
My little Linux and tech blog
The Core is not really that much. It is just enough to say they are Cross Platform like Java, but really not enough to allow a dev to run .Net code compiled on Windows on a linux or Mac. Mono is actually alot further along, and actually WANTS the CLR to run Cross Platform.
Scott Carr