May 21, 2005

If any of you doubt the power of the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) maybe these screencasts might help

IKVM.NET Weblog - Cross Language Debugging in MonoDevelop

To ensure I don't get in the way of who posted what first I will simply let Jeroen's post do the "chain of command" talking:

Lluis Sánchez posted some cool screencasts that demo cross language debugging in MonoDevelop [via Miguel de Icaza].

Wow and Wow!

A couple weeks ago I speculated...

...that by years end we would see a beta of a Microsoft built Java 1.4/5/6 -> CIL (Common Intermediate Language - > Buy < this book if you don't own it already) compiler. Recent events would lend well to the idea that this may not be that far from reality. But with each release of Jeroen's IKVM.NET project I become more and more convinced that such an effort, while fantastic if it does happen, may not be all that big of a deal if it doesn't. What makes this statement all the more compelling and believable is the announcement of the Harmony project (for those who slept the last two weeks away, Harmony is a J2SE project announced recently by the Apache foundation) and the fact that Jeroen is a part of the core set of developers who have volunteered their services if this project comes into existence. After many inquiries, including one from myself, Jeroen made a May 9th post to help bring a better understanding to what this project is all about and, what seemed to have been "the question of the hour", was this a "start from scratch" project or would there be an effort to merge with the Gnu Classpath project... the latter is the case but I would definitely follow that link to gain more insite. As to why put the effort into a J2SE project when your core interests exist within the .NET framework? I'll leave that for Jeroen to answer himself but it would seem to me that a complete open source J2SE 5 implementation would mean a complete J2SE-based byte-code to CIL conversion via IKVM.NET. Seems as compelling a reason as any tp put forth the effort but please don't mistake my speculation for fact as I am most definitely speculating.

When you look at the list of .NET-enabled languages and realize just how much more the ECMA-standardized CLI brings to the open standards development world it really makes you wonder why people walk away with the sense that Microsoft is the bad-guy. I don't want to bad mouth Java or Sun because I believe that (especially in a 1.4+ J2SE world) Java is a really powerful language that has been developed by an amazing group of software engineeers. But one-size doesn't fit all, especially when you bring programming paradigms into the picture (e.g. Functional language development, Object-Oriented development, Component-Oriented development, Aspect-Oriented development, etc...) and when you have designed a system in which all of these paradigms and associated languages have the ability run using a Common Language Runtime(CLR) and as such interact with any other language this runtime supports, calling upon its objects, routines, functions, methods, etc.. I simply can't imagine a more perfect programming paradigm and as such, platform in which to build the future of software applications upon.

Now if the CLI was not standardized and projects such as Mono, dotGnu (Portable.NET), in some regards the OCL Project and others did not exist we would be looking at a situation that is much different, much more proprietary, and as such deserved of every second, third, and fourth "yeah, but..." look the suspicious effort invoked. But we're not. And when you see projects like those showcased in the above screencasts and realize that these are being run on top of a Linux kernel, using open source tools, led by open source luminaries such as Miguel de Icaza, et. Al. you simply can not question the fact that a world build on top of the CLI is pretty fucking cool world!

At least thats my opinion anyway. ;)