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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."
Because, you know, open sourcing by the devil has to be evil! :-)
In all seriousness though, does this make .NET more open than Java? In other words, RMS-acceptable?
My Stack Overflow user
Not this time, the new guy has decided that selling Windows is no longer the lock-in platform that makes us all buy Microsoft stuff.
Now, the Microsoft stuff they want use to all buy is services, and that means they have to supply said services across every platform possible.
So, open source .NET in the hope that it'll be cheaper to port it (ie you'll do it for them) and then all those lovely .NET apps that use things like Azure and Microsoft Ads will be ported to Linux and Mac and Microsoft can reap the revenue from more people consuming their services.
Its the same story really, only this time the lock-in has shifted slightly away from Windows.
Sorry no, WPF is the new Silverlight. Microsoft wants you to use HTML5+js (which isn;t much different from XAML+c# anyway).
They are pushing Cordova now, the Visual Studio addin that gives you support for that can do you cross platform GUIs (and on phone) and they are saying its the best way to create "Metro" apps. Expect more of this rather than WPF that is crippled partly by poor performance and partly by infghting between the Microsoft teams.
And this should color your understanding of WHY they are finally doing it. .NET v1 applications out there that are no longer supported by MS, in any shape or manner.
Because, you know, there are thousands of
So they're just throwing the code out there to satisfy some non-upgrading hanger-ons, in the hope that those clients won't ditch MS entirely when they have to rewrite their custom applications.
It's a weak gesture, and far too late to be of any practical use.
Nice hand-waving though - gets the whole IT community excited to argue its merits.
Even bad press is better than none, sometimes.