Microsoft Starts Working On an LLVM-Based Compiler For .NET

An anonymous reader writes Are the days of Microsoft's proprietary compiler over? Microsoft has announced they've started work on a new .NET compiler using LLVM and targets their CoreCLR — any C# program written for the .NET core class libraries can now run on any OS where CoreCLR and LLVM are supported. Right now the compiler only supports JIT compilation but AOT is being worked on along with other features. The new Microsoft LLVM compiler is called LLILC and is MIT-licensed.

Comments

Developers, Developer, Developers

[CSHARP123]

The old CEO was shouting developers, developers and pushing them aside. This CEO doesn't make a peep but quietly bringing in the developers

Re:Developers, Developer, Developers

[ranton]

Well I can say these announcements have brought me back to developing in .Net. C# has been my favorite language by far ever since v3.5 (and was my favorite by a little since v2.0) but its vendor lock was becoming too much of a liability.

The moment I can go back to C# and easily have my code run on *nix servers I will drop Java in a heartbeat. Just being able to use LINQ again in my professional life will be a blessing. And going back to Visual Studio over Eclipse / Netbeans / and even IntelliJ is also something I have been longing for.

Re:Developers, Developer, Developers

[neilo_1701D]

How did Ballmer push developers aside?

He pushed them aside by killing development systems (VB6,FoxPro), introducing new technologies with the promise of how critical they were to the future (Silverlight), and allowing the crown jewels of Windows development, the Win32 API, to slowly become more irrelevant with endless layers of cruft built on top (eg. .net, although a wonderful system, becomes more and more incompatible with the underlying OS; eg. GDI+).

Microsoft started open sourcing a lot of their developer frameworks etc (ASP.Net MVC in 2012, Entity Framework in 2013 etc) and we saw fairly large shifts in developer conferences and support

By your own words, we can infer that Ballmer's middle-empire period required large shifting from where it was to what it became.

Ballmer wasn't bad; his jumping around on stage shouting "Developers!" showed that he knew what the true value of Windows was: the external developers who wrote Win32 code for retail products or company-internal developers. However, his middle-empire stage was a shift to focusing on selling to enterprise customers. This isn't a bad things by itself, but by taking his eye off the "Developer!" ball and focusing elsewhere, he guaranteed that plenty of developers went elsewhere. For example, with the death of VB plenty of developers shifted to Java rather than .net. The fact that it needed a large shift in support shoes just how far developers had slipped in Microsoft's priority.

It's interesting to see how Nadella is shifting the focus again and broadening it (Windows 10 on Raspberry Pi, for example). Time will tell if Nadella is simply being an anti-Ballmer or if this glasnost is signs of a more fundamental shift in the way Microsoft does business. I hope it's the latter.

Re:Developers, Developer, Developers

[Anonymous Coward]

VB6 and FoxPro served their purpose and needed to end. They were prototypes for various parts of what became .Net.

VB6 was discontinued right away when Microsoft combined VBRUNxxx.DLL with their Java implementation that got shitcanned by the anti-trust courts. Then they refined it into a common language runtime for a VB variant, a Java variant, and a heavily modified variant of C and all of the object oriented stuff that has cropped up around it. Later, they dropped the Java variant. Later still, they added a functional programming language.

FoxPro was discontinued when they released LINQ, which basically mimics the one thing FoxPro had going for it that nothing else did.

Win32 has not become "irrelevant", since all of the newer technologies still rely on those older ones. (.Net "winforms" simply packages up the old Win32 WNDCLASSEX and window class registration and instantiation into a handy Form object, so instead of 80+ lines of boiler-plate code, you use a simple new Form() and be done with it. I fail to see how this is anything but progress.)

And .Net uses GDI and GDI+ directly, and has done so since day 1. More recently, it also uses Direct3D and Windows Media Framework directly.

It's actually rather amazing that otherwise well-informed people on tech sites keep parroting this panicky crap that naysayers said years ago without doing any research into whether it's correct or not. It seems that the one thing Microsoft hasn't been able to change is the level of trust people place in them. A good portion of that was earned, but it's also about time that some people at least brush a few of the chips off of their shoulders.

I don't understand

[Blaskowicz]

With LLVM using an intermediate representation of code (LLVM IR) and CLR another : MSIL, now called CIL, does that mean it goes C# -> LLVM bytecode -> .NET bytecode?, does the JIT does both steps at once, why doesn't that mean every single language with a LLVM target can now run on the CoreCLR?, was LLVM modified, was what's in my first question horribly wrong?

Re:I don't understand

[HyperQuantum]

I didn't look into the details of the project, but to me it seems to like the following:

A JIT compiler is used in a virtual machine to run a function/method by compiling it from some sort of bytecode or intermediate representation to native code and then jumping to the generated code to execute it. So in this case this would be when the Common Language Runtime wants to run a CIL method for the first time: it generates LLVM intermediate representation from the CIL, then uses LLVM to compile that to native code.

So it would be: CIL --> LLVM data --> native code

This means that the CLR, and thus all code compiled for .NET, can run on all platforms that LLVM can generate native code for.