Microsoft Open Sources CoreCLR, the .NET Execution Engine

An anonymous reader writes: As part of Microsoft's continuing project to open source the .NET framework, the company has announced that CoreCLR, the execution engine for .NET Core, is now available on GitHub. CoreCLR handles things like garbage collection, compilation to machine code, and IL byte code loading. The .NET team said, "We have released the complete and up-to-date CoreCLR implementation, which includes RyuJIT, the .NET GC, native interop and many other .NET runtime components. ... We will be adding Linux and Mac implementations of platform-specific components over the next few months. We already have some Linux-specific code in .NET Core, but we're really just getting started on our ports. We wanted to open up the code first, so that we could all enjoy the cross-platform journey from the outset."

Comments

Re:.NET applications on Linux?

[silviuc]

If they're CLI, yeah, you'll be able to. You could already do that using mono. The problem is GUI applications that use WinForms which is not open-source and probably won't be for a looong time.
MS likes Linux as a server, on Azure.

Re:How many...

[Richard_at_work]

Microsoft Patent Promise for .NET Libraries and Runtime Components

Microsoft Corporation and its affiliates ("Microsoft") promise not to assert
any .NET Patents against you for making, using, selling, offering for sale,
importing, or distributing Covered Code, as part of either a .NET Runtime or
as part of any application designed to run on a .NET Runtime.

https://github.com/dotnet/core...

The MIT License (MIT)

Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all
copies or substantial portions of the Software.

https://github.com/dotnet/core...

If you weren't so hung up on flogging a dead horse for mod points, MS has covered patents and licensing in the codebase itself.

Re:How many...

[Richard_at_work]

Promissory Estoppel makes it legally binding, new CEO or not.

Re:How many...

[Richard_at_work]

Where did this myth that looking at code would expose you to legal issues come from? Has any court case actually gone through which hinged on a developer "poisoning" themselves for all eternity by looking at a competitors code base? I certainly haven't heard of any - even the original Compaq team did clean room implementations of the IBM Bios purely as a legal belt and braces, it wasn't based on any legal rulings in place.

Re:Too Late Really

[Richard_at_work]

The .Net CoreCLR is a rewrite of the .Net CLR from the ground up to support the specifics of the vNext project, so the Xamarian project isn't a good fit for this either as they would still need to start from scratch. Xamarian will still cover the entire CLR as it currently does (with some exceptions to the base class libraries), while the CoreCLR platform is a hugely stripped down and optimised runtime designed to be deployed with individual apps.

For example, at the moment you deploy a .Net web app to IIS and it uses the .Net runtime installed server wide (in the GAC). With Mono, you deploy it to Apache and tell Apache to use the Mono runtime - but that is still Apache wide, so you can't run a second version of Mono without running a second instance of Apache configured specifically.

In vNext, you deploy your web app and it comes with everything it needs to run - application code, CLR, Katana (or other OWIN implementation) and even a choice of web servers which are not dependent on the target server. This means you can run different versions of .Net for different applications, and can upgrade some without affecting others - because upgrading .Net is now as simple as redeploying the site. It also means no heavy dependency on IIS or Apache.

Thats why its not an adaptation of Xamarian, because the two are quite different - however, at the recent NDC where they announced all this, they did announce much closer ties with Xamarian to work on Mono as the full implementation of .Net cross platform, so Xamarian aren't being left out to dry.

Re:.NET applications on Linux?

[HyperQuantum]

The problem is not WinForms, but WPF. An increasing amount of applications use WPF because WinForms is considered 'deprecated' by Microsoft and people are encouraged to use WPF instead, which is the new 'hot stuff'.

Re:.NET applications on Linux?

[PRMan]

WinForms has worked fine on Linux for a long time. WinForms in Mono. Even better if you declare a folder named "C:" and then declare 5-6 folders named "Program Files", "Program Files (x86)", "Users", "AppData", etc. under that. If you declare the right folder scheme, a large percentage of Windows applications will run perfectly on Mono as is.

mod parent up

[stoploss]

Aren't guys like you tired of bitching about Microsoft... for fucks sake, they are in the process of releasing their entire toolchain (from the bottom up) under the MIT licence.

Parent is actually insightful. Naturally, I didn't RTFA, but the summary should have mentioned the license. I assumed this was yet another MS "open source" release under one of their shitty proprietary licenses (you know, the kind of "open source" that is so restrictive it practically comes with an NDA).

Using a Free license like MIT actually makes this more than an empty gesture. Yes, I actually confirmed the LICENSE.txt on the github project is MIT License.

Re:mod parent up

[sombragris]

I will give MS the benefit of the doubt in this one. Good for them, and for the cause of Free Software.

However, about your rhetorical question:

Okay, I'll bite: how many entities has MS sued for .net patent violations on the subsequent versions, as you referenced? It's been the better part of a decade now, right? No doubt they have sprung their trap...?

I'll answer: I don't know, but MS doesn't need to sue when half of all Android devices worldwide paid extortion money to MS to the tune of USD 28 billion in confidential settlements, and it refuses to disclose which exact patents it is using for (extortion) licensing.

IMHO, the trap has sprung, and has bitten a lot of people. So yes, some distrust in MS is well warranted.

Re:Too Late Really

[dissy]

Xamarian Mono or it's predecessor Ximian Mono. This is both a good and bad thing because while they're releasing the code, why aren't they working with Xamarian since they've already got a cross platform .NET environment?

An interview with Miguel De Icaza (creator of Mono and co-founder of Xamarin) on that very question:
Microsoft .NET released from its Windows chains... but what ABOUT MONO?

Re:Oh look, it's the Java killer...

[Anonymous Coward]

There's already a very strong Java killer on the market.

Its name is Oracle.