Re: GNOME, .Net and Mono

[Erik Bågfors <erik bagfors nu>]

On Sun, 2002-02-03 at 23:01, Sean Middleditch wrote:
> 
> On Sun, 2002-02-03 at 13:28, Sander Vesik wrote:
> > 
> > On 1 Feb 2002, Sean Middleditch wrote:
> > 
> > > 
> > > On Fri, 2002-02-01 at 19:03, Gérard Milmeister wrote:
> > > > 
> > 
> > [snip]
> > 
> > > 
> > > Why then would being based on Mono, a fully Open Source codebase, be
> > > something to be worried about, any more than basing it on an "arcane"
> > > language like C (GNOME now) or a "bloated" language like C++ (KDE).  
> > > (And just for the record, my favorite languages are C and C++ - I just
> > > used the stereotypes for those languages).
> > > 
> > 
> > A very legitimate reason not to want to use .NET is it being based on a
> > new, largely untried VM - if the goal really was to go with a VM, then
> > there are much older, tried and quite probbaly in the mid-term, better VMs
> > around than Mono. And this isn't a plug for java - its use of a VM is
> > nothing new.
> 
> That is a good point.  But, do any of these VM's do what Mono does?  Can
> language like Perl, Python, Ruby, and so on all run on top of these
> VM's?

I think the .NET VM will be more useful for languages like C#, Java,
Managed C++ and other static languages.  Perl, Python and Ruby are not
easy to run in .Net because they are to dynamic..

This is also one of the reason parrot is invented.  From the parrot faq.



11. Why your own virtual machine? Why not compile to JVM/.NET?

Those VMs are designed for statically typed languages. That's fine,
since Java, C#, and lots of other languages are statically typed. Perl
isn't. For a variety of reasons, it means that perl would run more
slowly there than on an interpreter geared towards dynamic languages.

12. So you won't run on the JVM/.NET?

Sure we will. They're just not our first target. We build our own
interpreter/VM, then when that's working we start in on the JVM and/or
.NET back ends.



In alot of sense parrot will be .Net for dynamic languages.

/Erik

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Erik Bågfors               | erik bagfors nu
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