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."

Comments

Microsoft's Press Release

[Anonymous Coward]

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Uh, why?

[jd]

Very few OO languages come remotely close to taking advantage of the fact that OO is inherently highly parallelizable. An instance of an object is, to all practical intents and purposes, a thread. Method invocation is method invocation, whether you are looking at Java, CORBA, or MPI. Yet most languages treat OO as though it were simply a very fancily-encapsulated sequential program. This is important - it's easy to serialize a parallel approach, it's bloody hard to parallelize a serial approach. (Why do you think there are so few decent parallel programmers - to the point Intel has to beg people to write parallel code?)

Also, very few OO languages are consistent. Advanced IDE and RAD packages are needed, together with books that aren't just dead tree matter but look about the size of said dead tree, because the interfaces are illogical, and what is mathematically pure and correct is often not directly implementable at all.

OO could be better. OO should be better.

Others have picked up on the failures of existing implementations, though for different reasons. D is infinitely better than C#, C++ or Java, for example. If you want a good, solid, cross-platform framework, then writing it for D would make more sense than writing it for C#. And although .Net is ok, it's not what I'd call good. Use ACE+TAU+CIAO for a while. Real-Time CORBA 3 isn't lightning-fast, but I'd use it over .Net any day.