One Runtime To Bind Them All 479
Sowbug writes "Here's some interesting Saturday night reading: a critical examination of many of the advertised benefits of .NET's CLR (Common Language Runtime) and the other technologies (MSIL, CLS, CTS) that make it possible. It's written from the perspective of a Java advocate, Osvaldo Pinali Doederlein. "
Unbiased Articles? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Unbiased Articles? (Score:5, Interesting)
Then it goes on to say that surely the JVM can be extended if this proves to be a selling point for .NET (which is probably true, but it kind of makes you wonder why sun haven't already done it).
Re:Unbiased Articles? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Unbiased Articles? (Score:5, Insightful)
But to the horde of developers that will be migrating from Visual Studio 6.0 to Visual Studio.NET. I've met quite a few VB developers who are unwilling to give up their syntax yet would love to take advantage of
It is a very valuable marketing point, and it allows for a very easy transition/upgrade for many developers out there already targetting Windows.
Re:Unbiased Articles? (Score:2)
That's the point. The most important is how your PR dept will present your product : Jim McCarthy (responsible for early MS VC++'s releases) in Dynamics of Software Developement explains how it doesn't really matter what are your product's capabilities. The more important is to make people confident about it.
The matter in C# vs Java is who offers the easiest language. Users will pick the one they understand
Re:Unbiased Articles? (Score:3, Interesting)
Thats *more* biased (Score:4, Funny)
apply the razor please (Score:2, Insightful)
If the only thing the authors have in common is your readership, they might be right and you might be wrong.
Re:apply the razor please (Score:2, Flamebait)
A tool that claims to do all things for all people never does anything well. C pound is one of those tools. The article does a good job showing how each of the implimented launguages applies its flaws to C pound rather than it's strengths. The result is a crippled java without multiple inheritences and most of the rest of java's strengths.
The reason people write that they don't like the new M$ toy is not because they don't like M$, it's because they don't like the new toy.
C pound has all the stench of the M$ fortran effort. Before they were the Empire of the Dumb, it was interesting to see a nice little DOS fortran compiler. Next they extended it to include support for their Win3.1 GUI with the user kernel. That was replaced with a 32 bit DOS extended compiler, which was in turn replaced with a module for their Developer, which promised to unite VB, C++ fortran and Java(? I can't remember if java made it in there). After all that jerk around, each transition breaking the previous extentions, the finally dropped it alltogether. They never seriously focused on the isssues that needed to be solved to make it more than a toy, ie be able to compile the tremendous body of legacy code, and in the end trashed it on their platform all together. These days real fortran work is a pain in the ass on M$, with each OS shift breaking the kludge that got around the last limitations. It's much easier to pick up comercial Linux compilers of G77, as everyone else focused on the strengths of fortran and made comilers that do useful work. M$'s effort to extinguish fortran on their platform has simply shifted physisists and others to other platforms.
Go download the .NET STANDARD, and go find the documents that Sun publishs about their technology.
Do you know what a standard is? The above shows not.
Re:apply the razor please (Score:3, Interesting)
Except that it isn't mature,
it is more mature than you think.
it is not the language, it is the libraries that you code against. for example, Windows Forms could easily be called WFC 2.0, same for many other classes.
ADO.NET is a successor to ADO, it is not 'imature' as you say. also, it is two generations ahead of anything that java has to offer to access databases.
ASP.NET is again the next version of ASP, it improved od ASP, it is not a '1.0' version. again, much richer that JSP.
take web services, and then look at sun's pathetic response (oh, yeah, we have web services too). i would call java web services api much more imature that microsofts.
How could it be unbiased? (Score:3, Insightful)
Personally I think that those strongly familiar with Java are probably the most qualified to write on the subject of
Really, the only unbiased source in this debate is an uninformed source, and that's really of no help. Take what the author has said, check his facts, and judge his opinions on your own. In the end, you'll probably find that, as it has always been, certain languages and architectures are well suited to certain tasks. You aren't going to write device drivers in C# and you probably aren't going to write a cross platform GUI application in assembler.
Re:Unbiased Articles? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Unbiased Articles? (Score:2)
Quoting Bill Joy or James Gosling isn't going to give you an unbiased view of
Re:Unbiased Articles? (Score:2)
The article itself is really quite unimportant. The language neutral ability of the CLR is a marketing point as it's a convenient selling point to Visual BASIC developers looking to upgrade. Nobody disputes that, but it is still a very nice feature to have. I challenge anybody to find a company which has code written in only one language.
The conclusion the article makes is what most critically damns it as biased. His points are purely political in nature, he admits it. He goes on to try to distance himself from the bias by claiming he is not condemning
But then he goes on to make an anti-Microsoft statement, condemning this feature as nothing more than marketing, but yet instead implying that Sun is somehow different with their Java hype.
There are a lot of articles out there about
The first step is to admit when you have a problem. From there you can solve it.
Topic beat to death already... (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, m$ has to do something. (Score:4, Interesting)
Java itself is not any kind of 'true' general standard, sun can do whatever they want to with it. There's no real reason that Microsoft should bind itself to sun's implementation. So
This won't kill java anymore then java would have killed windows. Microsoft's CLR will provide a better way to write windows-only programs. I don't see why everyone needs to be up in arms about it.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Well, m$ has to do something. (Score:3, Interesting)
Could have fooled me. I develop Java apps on a Linux machine that are deployed not only to other operating systems but to PDAs and other connection limited devices such as java capable cell phones. All with a true cross platform, high quality development environment that is very productive.
Geez, some people's kids.
Re:Well, m$ has to do something. (Score:3, Insightful)
Uh, have you ever heard of the "little concept" called J2EE? It's the app server/services technology that powers a big chunk of the large-scale e-commerce backend. I work with this stuff every day, and it has a lot more than "neat little benefits". Have you ever heard of IBM's Websphere? How about BEA's Weblogic? J2EE is currently the ONLY credible enterprise-level app server standard around.
Get your head out of your ass. Little Windows applications at your computer super-store aren't what this stuff is about. It's the server side where the big money, and the truly large-scale systems, are. And on the server, Java rules.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Well, m$ has to do something. (Score:3, Interesting)
Sure,
If you still don't believe me, you'll (kindly) notice that MS marketing literature is mainly directed at J2EE. MS even went so far as to re-implement the Java Pet Store server in
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Java has not yet failed on the desktop... (Score:3, Informative)
After some work, we had an MDI all-swing application taht worked pretty well and had some a number of nice custom controls. While a little slow on a P166 with 32MB of RAM, it was quite usable and needless to say on anything even a bit more powerful (like the developers screamin' fast P450's) you'd think it was a native app.
So, speed is not really Java's problem on the desktop.
The swing framework I found great and very nice for devloping powerful custom controls with minimal code. I would not say that a good GUI library is what Java lacks either (and there are others to choose from for those that hate Swing as some do).
What I think Java has sufferd from is the large footprint and somehwhat long startup times (though those have been reduced). OS X has helped a lot be really integrating Java into the UI a bit, and doing things like sharing some Java resources for running programs.
So, Java needs some way to help share Java resources to make many desktop Java apps practical.
What Java also needs though is desktop Java programming tools. Some are already there - both Installshield and InstallAnywhere make GREAT Java installers that work well across many platforms. But I would say IDE's have not really helped the Desktop standalone developer. Sure there are a lot of GUI tools, but I think desktop app development needs more than just GUI builders to help you build a good desktop app. While I'm not exactly sure what that might consist of, I think that's an area that needs work.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Correct (Score:4, Informative)
Exactly. Never. Java is a neat little concept - that has some neat little benefits. But it has caught on for large-scale applications.
Though I suspect that was a typo. Java has caught on for large-scale applications. The reason you can't buy Java apps in Best Buy is because they don't sell large scale applications. They sell boxed programs for PCs and Macs that are almost exclusively written in C++. Java's principle use is for the server side of various business systems.
This is the field MS are aiming for with .NET, too. Indeed, that seems to be its principle purpose: to displace Java from back-end server systems. Microsoft already owns the desktop, and Java is no particular threat there for reasons that don't need to be rehearsed again. For the device market, they have other plans.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Well, m$ has to do something. (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Well, m$ has to do something. (Score:2)
When was the last time you went to Best Buy and bought any program that was written in Visual Basic? How about Perl? Python?
Shrink-wrap software for consumers is a VERY small part of the software market. Most software is developed for corporate use, not consumers. Java is very viable for corporate development, especially for server-side code. Swing isn't nearly as successful, but it can do the job if you're a good Swng programmer.
-jon
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Well, m$ has to do something. (Score:2)
Well there are two things wrong with this sentence.
1) What makes you think Java failed in being a true cross platform high quality application development environment? What is your definition of fail in the first place? Are you saying there are no applications written in java that are cross platform? This is a nonsensical thing to say considering the millions of java devlopers in the world and the tens of thousands of businesses using it every day in massive scaled applications. You must have some really whacked definition of the word "fail".
2) GNU will create mono. Mono will run C#. It will not be 100% compatible with the MS implementation. This is because MS holds patents on most of the
Mono will not bring cross platfrom capabilities to
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Well, m$ has to do something. (Score:2)
Re:Well, m$ has to do something. (Score:2)
Also, I think you're needlessly conflating desktop and commercial software. There's plenty of non-commerical desktop software, and the non-desktop commercial software market is massive.
But after all that, I agree that free .NET implementation(s) may succeed on the libre software desktop (I don't care what it does on the unfree desktop), where Java has failed to gain any significant foothold.
I think C# and .NET are kinda neat despite their source (I could say the same about Java's source, they're both amoral corporations), and I hope that mono does meet all of Miguel de Icaza's expectations in terms of making free software developers more productive. I also think Java still has a chance on the libre desktop if and only if Sun wakes up and makes the JDK open source!
Re:Well, m$ has to do something. (Score:3, Funny)
Very true.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Well $un has to do something (Score:2)
This is what lit a fire under Mr. Gates' ass. Navigator + Java = badNews. However, applets turned out to be craplets (even while MS wrote the best JVM); stand-alone Java was too slow for the desktop; Java failed to score any significant headway.
But, Java could still be marketed for *server* development, so Sun decided to retrofit the embedded-language-that-could into a full-blown enterprise development lanaguge. (Hence the evil that is J2EE.)
Of course, using Java on the server means buying big iron, which, by coincidence, Sun happens to sell. It was always about the server.
Wow; you would almost swear they planned it this way.
high-quality? (Score:2)
Who told you that? Steve Baller?
Let's summarize the article as, "A tool that claims to do all things for all people in all places, generally does nothing well." Hey, its good for my writing skills =:> As the authors point out:
Programming languages exist in wide variety, not only because different tasks (from systems programming to artificial intelligence) require different tools, but also because there is no One True Way to serve even one domain.
Yup, it's true and he goes on to show us how C Pound is gimped by the limits of each of the languages it wishes to extend and extinguish.
The CLS only supports single, static inheritance.
Languages such as C++ and Eiffel need multiple inheritance of implementation. Cross-language support for MI may not be possible, as MI creates some hard problems (like repeated inheritance and name clashes) that different languages solve in different, incompatible ways.
Yup!
There is currently zero support for generic programming in the CLS.
Compile-time mechanisms like C++ templates are supported, but they are not cross-language: no way to instantiate your stack.
He goes on with a few more damming examples including how incompatible different (VB buzzord!) Methods are. His conclusion is both damning and accurate:
For the CLR, we can certainly rely that everything is optimized to favor C#. The result will be inferior performance for any language which behavior is significantly different from C#.
Someone asked what people are "up in arms about." I suppose the Java people, who have made a fine and stable standard, are upset because the MicroTurds are going to spend lots of money saying this new C# is better than their work when it is not. They will back it up with the usual spred specturm attack of poor performance for all other languages under their platofrm. I feel their pain. Me? I'm not up in arms because I could care less, M$ is irrelavant. Even if they built the best freaking comiler in the world, their underlying OS is still so buggy and screwed up applications will never work right. People have noticed. The other folks up in arms are M$ dependents who are consistently let down. Their demise is the demise of my coworkers and it brings me no joy.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Well, m$ has to do something. (Score:4, Insightful)
While Sun can do anything it wants with Java, it is just as much a standard as
Now, what makes you think that Microsoft won't do exactly what it wants with
And of course all those fancy development tools (Visual
Re:Well, m$ has to do something. (Score:2, Insightful)
Wait, say that again, "third party implementations", meaning what exactly? Modifications to the original "standard" or building off of the already existing base? I don't think that I've seen a GPL'd java or a red-hat java. While I've seen plenty of vm's and additional components I don't think I've seen any truly third party implementations. If what you said was true then Microsoft would have had right to continue to fudge their version of java into anything they wanted to.
On to standards: Standards come in two forms A) Standard by popularity B) Standard by decree. While Java is a standard by popularity (similar to how IE is the standard browser), Sun refuses to give up any control whatsoever of the product in order for it to make a very important step into an actual documented and decreed standard. This would mean giving some measurable control up to a standards board such as ECMA, IETF, etc. What makes you think that Sun won't do exactly what it wants with Java?
Re:Well, m$ has to do something. (Score:2)
I don't think that I've seen a GPL'd java or a red-hat java.
This page [dwheeler.com] lists several non-Sun Java implementations. Several of them are open source, GPL'ed and are in fact part of the standard Red Hat distributions.
As far as Sun not giving up control, well, didn't the Microsoft attempt to hijack Java prove that they had some justification in this?
Articles at Microsoft.com (Score:3, Informative)
Science of Software where? (Score:2)
Autocoding - where the language doesn't much matter, so long as the programming concepts are accessible [google.com]
What I don't get.... (Score:2)
Re:What I don't get.... (Score:3, Insightful)
This is a simple one. I write perl, you write C#. You write a routine in C#, and a front-end in C#. I don't like your front-end so I rewrite mine in perl, and it all works.
However, I have a biggol' feeling that this will wind up as Java's platform independance. Half-Working.
.NET is there so that they can lump everything into it, say they Innovated it at the
So far, NET involves a way to log into Hotmail, a planned Java rewrite, and..., and
But you can't do that ... (Score:2)
There are also two errors in the rest of your post: Java's platform independence works just fine, and C# and the CLR have been released, they're not "planned".
Re:What I don't get.... (Score:2)
Besides you will not be able use perl anyways. It will be "managed" perl. Which to you will mean a mutant bastard stepchild of perl much like VB.NET is a mutant bastard stepchild of VB.
Might as well use C#
Re:What I don't get.... (Score:2)
Possibly because different languages have different strengths. At my work, most of the system for the project we are working on is written in Java, but I am writing one module in Mercury because that particular module does a lot of symbol manipuation and has a large 'logical' component, so a logical language is far more suitable than Java, but only for that component.
However, in these cases, it is good to have to go through some middleware (I'm using CORBA) or API to keep the modules apart. rather than sharing of structures pushing everything down to a lowest common denominator. So in that way, I agree with you
Sort of offtopic (Score:2)
Having many different JVMs would be great if they weren't all incompatible in some way.
Java is meant to be a "write once, run anywhere" but the sad fact is if I switch JVM then I can't even get some java programs to run on my own computer let alone on someone elses.
The easiest and best way to fix this would be for Sun to release their code under a free lisence and everyone switch to that. The next best way to fix this would be to make every JVM compatible, which might happen on some imaginary world but not is never going to happen in the real world. The third solution is to stop pretending that the JVMs are compatible and start distributing programs with the JVM they use. That's probably the only solution that works.
I hope that we don't end up having the same kind of crap with c# on Linux. In this sense I would really prefer one Runtime to bind them.
Re:Sort of offtopic (Score:2)
Sure, there are different RELEASE VERSIONS of the Sun JVM and different RELEASE VERSIONS of the IBM JVM, but by and large the "incompatibilities" are bug fixes. Complaining about fixing bugs is silly.
On most other platforms, there is a single VM, supplied by the vendor. On the Mac, there is a VM for OS 9 and one for OS X.
So I'm not exactly sure what the benefit of Sun open sourcing the JVM is. Do you not want to see bug fixes?
-jon
Cross-Platform Java CLR (Score:4, Interesting)
Q: So why do we have the need for a next bytecode layer on top of Pentium & SPARC?
A: To be cross platform! This is correct in the case of Java and the JVM. The intention is compile once, run everywhere.
The problem we now have however is that Microsoft sees cross platform differently in my opinion. Cross-platform is merely compatibility between their CE, Win9x and NT product lines. How big will the push be within one year by Microsoft to keep the developed truly cross platform?
Isn't that the question we must ask ourselves?
Re:Cross-Platform Java CLR (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, this is not true.
Current machines are heavily biased toward running manifestly-typed, single-stack-oriented languages much more quickly than others (that would be Fortran, C, etc., for all of you less than language astute types out there). Languages that use more complex models (like C++ with its indirect VTBL pointer calls) run slower. Languages that use even more complex features like dynamic typing, continuations, re-entrant exceptions (like Lisp, Scheme, Smalltalk, etc.) run even slower. And languages that have non-standard control structures (SNOBOL, ICON, PROLOG, expert system shells, etc.) run slowest of all. All of these issues can be ameliorated by enough compiler technology, but in the end, the cost of emulating these features in the VM adds up.
My point is that there is no such thing as a completely language neutral VM. One can try to make the VM more general, but you do pay for it in RT size and performance. VM's take less of a hit than silicon in these cases, though, and all of the VM manufacturers could do a better job of extending their VM's. Putting in hooks for dynamic typing, overflow checking, non-contiguous stack segments, and non-fixed method lookup machinery would help a lot.
For more interesting info on how this applies to silicon processor design (especially WRT C), see Hennessy and Patterson [fatbrain.com].
You can use many languages with the JVM (Score:4, Informative)
Hmm?
Are you all silly billies?
There's dozens of the bastards... Christ, the've even got Cobol and Ada. I wasn't even trying hard and, sorry tolk...
http://grunge.cs.tu-berlin.de/~tolk/vmlanguages
--
Its the framework thats reuseable (Score:2)
Re:Its the framework thats reuseable (Score:2, Interesting)
Yes. See the documentation here [jython.org]
Re:You can use many languages with the JVM (Score:2)
Every runtime environment, whether it be CLR, a JVM, or even machine code for a particular processor, provides capabilites that make some languages more efficient than others (although the machine code tends to be most language neutral - the more low level something is, the less assumptions it is going to impose).
To give some specific examples of things that the JVM does poorly (if you want these features), and this is not an exhaustive list:
* The JVM doesn't deal with unsigned quantities - you could design a class that emulates them, but it is going to be a big speed hit.
* No tail recursion - this is really important for functional languges, some of which absolutely require it. There are workarounds such as a technique called a 'trampoline' where you essentially take over stack management for yourself, but the cost of this in speed and complexity can be high.
* You cannot play directly with pointers. This is usually seen as a good point, but there are occasions that the ability to work with the very low level stuff allows very fast code. Again, you can always get the job done without them (except for OS level stuff and device drivers), but at a cost.
* If you want to use a different object model than the JVM assumes, you have to work around the JVM rather than with it.
Yes, there are lots of languages that have been implemented on top of a JVM but they will tend to be much slower, more resource hungry, and will often have all sorts of extra restrictions in the fine print that doesn't make these implementations a good choice for most applications. They are interesting excercises, and good on the people who have done the ports, but I consider the JVM suitable for only two sorts of language:
* Java, for which it has been tuned,
* Scripting languages, where speed is not of critical importance.
You could also build any language on top of a Turning Machine, but that doesn't mean it is a good idea.
job fun != nerf toys (Score:2, Insightful)
I think Python/Jython is the only language that allows you to do things like this. I doubt it's true for all the other languages which are compilable to the JVM.
-Laxitive
Re:job fun != nerf toys (Score:2, Informative)
I think Python/Jython is the only language that allows you to do things like this. I doubt it's true for all the other languages which are compilable to the JVM.
Kawa [gnu.org] allows you to define classes in Scheme that extend Java classes. It even supports multiple inheritance, by compiling a Scheme class to a pair of a Java interface and a Java class.
The obvious solution (Score:2, Funny)
Use an x86 emulator for all non-x86 platforms.
Let's be frank, Windows doesn't run on many(any?) non-x86 platforms so this makes a bit of sense. Instead of trying to design OOP intrinsically into the run-time, why not just agree on a common ABI.
Protection mechanisms can be handled through the run-time library. There really is not need for a CLR that is truly capable of running multiple languages.
That is not what MS is after though. MS is trying to compete with Java. There is no need for a CLR. This article really hits on a key issue.
Different hardware, different languages, and different ABI's all exist because they fit different niches. There can never be a system that handles everything as efficently.
Don't know what the subject should be (Score:2, Insightful)
Is he kidding here? As long as you are using any mainstream CPU, imperative languages are favored. All those CPU's are based on von Neumann model. Any program written in functional or logical languages will be penalized when run on such CPU's. So, at this moment there isn't a CPU architecture that will treat all programming paradigms equally, and neither a CLR/VM.
MS is at least trying to build a platform that will intergrate different languages. This is intention of CLR.
SUN is not trying to do this and JVM wasn't invented for this purpose. Sure JVM can be extended to support other languages, so can my plastic cup holder.
Re:Don't know what the subject should be (Score:2)
This strikes me as a false statment in general. The best example is the Symbolics Lisp machines. They were nuked from the market when RISC-based workstations performed faster than the Symbolics machines that were supposedly "tuned" for Lisp.
Are there ANY example out there of a specialty chip for a language outperforming a general purpose chip? I don't mean clock speed for clock speed, but at the same cost. More efficient but more expensive means niche at best.
-jon
Comparing apples and oranges (Score:2)
At the moment, the vast amount of development is done with imperative languages, and there are only a few common CPU's which all support those quite well - that's where the money is.
Compare the resources put into optimising a RISC chip, or even more, the incredible level of resources put into speeding up the x86 and compatibles, and at the other end, the huge volume of those things sold (don't forget the embedded market too).
This is why the Symbolics machines could not compete:
* I very much doubt that they could come even close to matching the resources that Intel, AMD, IBM, Motorola etc. could put into CPU design.
* Even with what they could produce, there was no way they were going to sell the volume of other manufacturers - therefore they had to charge a lot more.
This is why they lose out, even after the advantage of only having to tune for one language.
It my be possible (I'm no expert on this), that RISC is simply an inherently better way of producing a fast Lisp machine than trying to tweak for Lisp specifically, however looking at what gets sold and for how much has so much distortion that it is really no evidence either way.
One thing I will say for the general purpose chip for functional languages - it is much easier and more efficient to compile a functional language to assember than it is to compile it to JVM bytecode or even C. It is low level, so there are far less assumptions about how your language is going to behave to work around.
Closed standard? Open Standard? I pick door #2 (Score:5, Insightful)
This point has been made before, but it bears repeating. C# [www.ecma.ch] and the CLI (Common Language Infrastructure) [www.ecma.ch] are ECMA [www.ecma.ch] standards! As such Microsoft no longer truly controls them. There is nothing to keep Microsoft from 'embracing and extending' these standards if they do not like the direction they are going. Just as they can with any open standard. Just as you can with any open standard.
MS tried the embrace and extend strategy with Java, remember? And they ran into a huge roadblock. Namely Java is not an open standard. Despite what Sun says in the press releases the standard is not open in the same sense. Sun controls it and Sun can shut down any attempt to create a non-conforming version.
From some points of view this is a good thing. But, although I appreciate any argument that starts with 'We need to avoid incompatible versions.' I also know that Sun has not proven any better than Microsoft as a steward when it comes to keeping the commons clean and competitive. To put it simply; I just don't trust them. And I think there is an equally persuasive argument that competing products evolve faster while products without competition tend towards stagnation. This eco-system analogy appeals to me.
From this point of view let us return to 'embrace and extend'. In a closed standard a single organization controls all progress for that standard, with limited participation from the outside. In an open standard the process is, at least titually, open to outside input and you are more likely to see third-party enhancements absorbed into the standard itself. Furthermore no corporation is going to sue you if you create your own implementation of the standard. Even if it is tweaked to work best on a competing platform. (Can we all say 'Mono'?)
So, the way I look at it, C# and the CLI will drive Sun to improve Java. Third-party implementors will drive the C# and CLI specifications faster than MS would alone. In the end we get better technology. I like better technology. So I win either way.
Besides, I like the design of the CLI a lot. And C# looks like an arguably better language than Java.
Finally, many arguments in the 'One Runtime' article seem a bit weak to me. For example, "... Design-by-Contract, a fundamental strength of Eiffel that .NET does not support." Since when does 'Design By Contract' have to be baked into the underlying runtime to make it work? What is keeping you from implementing any kind of runtime you want on top of the CLS?
Jack William Bell, who likes the idea of coding with mix-n-match programming languages.
Re:Closed standard? Open Standard? I pick door #2 (Score:2)
Yes, but from a practical standpoint, if Microsoft decides to take the products in a direction away from the Open Standard version, then the Open Standard version will immediately become irrelevant.
Which, come to think of it, was exactly what they intended to do with Java. Make the Sun version irrelevant.
Re:Closed standard? Open Standard? I pick door #2 (Score:2)
Why? Apply that same question to Unix. Is Unix irrelevant because AT&T created a closed version of it? Or, for that matter, any number of other closed versions from any number of vendors? Or, even, an Open Source version? There is a common thread through all of those versions of Unix: Posix -- which is an open standard. Non-Posix implementations did not succeed in the long run no matter who created them.
Look, I don't trust MS either. And yes, they did try to hijack the Java standard. They did it by providing enhancements to the Java standard that were compelling enough that people used them. Sun had two choices; absorb the enhancements into the standard or take their ball and go home. They chose the latter.
So who was the winner in that little spat? MS? Sun? We programmers? I would call it losers all around.
With an open standard at least you know there is a chance some third-party enhancement that survives in the marketplace because people want to use it will get into the standard. And MS can only extend the standard with their own proprietary enhancements. They have limited control the standard as it exists now and (with the exception of patented stuff) cannot keep us from adding the enhancements to the standard if we like them.
Jack William Bell
Re:Closed standard? Open Standard? I pick door #2 (Score:2)
They also did it by providing a buggy implementation of the Java 1.0/1.1 classes that made it impossible to run, say, an applet in their JVM just like it would run in the standard implementations.
Re:Closed standard? Open Standard? I pick door #2 (Score:2)
Perhaps this is MS learning from Sun's mistakes. Even though Java is successful in certain applications, it would most likely be used for a wider range of applications if Sun hadn't been so harsh in keeping absolute control of their standard.
Microsoft must know by now that good things come from the programming community, therefore having the community suggest (and even implement) useful enhancements to their standard only helps them gain popularity.
Re:Closed standard? Open Standard? I pick door #2 (Score:2)
Hurray! Someone that understands my point and can make it more clear and concise than I can!
Jack William Bell, who thinks that we need to keep a gimlet eye on Microsoft anyway.
Re:Closed standard? Open Standard? I pick door #2 (Score:2, Interesting)
TWW
Re:Closed standard? Open Standard? I pick door #2 (Score:2)
Can you back that up with details? So far as I know all of the C# standard is open, all of the CLI standard is open and the all (or at least the most significant) non-platfrom specific libraries of the CLS are open.
Jack William Bell
Re:Closed standard? Open Standard? I pick door #2 (Score:2, Redundant)
Java is controlled through the trademark, not the language standard. Microsoft is free to embrace and extend Java all they want (and the have in fact with C# and J#). What Microsoft cannot do is call their variant Java.
Jack William Bell, who likes the idea of coding with mix-n-match programming languages.
As somewone who has to maintain code from time to time, the idea horrifies me.
Re:Closed standard? Open Standard? I pick door #2 (Score:2)
Valid point, but doesn't it cut both ways?
As do I. And I already have to deal with multiple languges, backends, frontends, extension libraries, coding styles, naming standards and everything else under the sun. At least with the CLI I know that I have a better chance of things interoperating. Besides some languages do map to a particular problem space better than another. And I can split work up between expert coders (with C#) and less skilled coders (with VB or Python).
Jack William Bell, who notes that the only responses posted so far supporting his stance come from Anonymous Cowards...
Re:Closed standard? Open Standard? I pick door #2 (Score:2)
Re:Closed standard? Open Standard? I pick door #2 (Score:2)
Actually that was exactly my point! MS can do exactly that. But if they do there is nothing (except patents) to keep ECMA from adding those enhancements to the standard if the enhancements really do provide something worthwhile.
Patents are a problem here, no way around that. But they are a problem everywhere! ECMA can always argue that an enhancement that cannot be reproduced is enough to keep the implementation from being called 'C#' or whatever. I don't think this is likely though. I am sure MS is a major financial contributor to ECMA for one thing.
In any case I consider this ability of MS (or anyone else) to embrace and extend a good thing. At least so long as we can pick and choose, in the marketplace of ideas, those enhancements we think add value then we will continually improve the standard. As has been pointed out you can do this with Java too -- but you cannot call it Java. In the case of an open standard like C# you can still call it C# and make some claim of being part of the C# idea-space. That is vital to the evoloution of an open standard. If the MS extensions to Kerebos are something people like you and me want to use then they should be added to Kerebos. Simple as that (patents aside).
Jack William Bell, who thinks that (generally) software patents are evil.
Re:Closed standard? Open Standard? I pick door #2 (Score:2)
Nice to know that with a convicted monopolist inventing the technology you will always be able to pick and choose between competitors isn't it...... Oh wait, there are no reasonable competitors to MS as ruled by a court of law.
Finally, you're arguments for embrace and extend apply just as much to Java as they do to C# - you can embrace and extend but if the owner of the trademark doesn't approve you have to rename it. Java is an open standard, go to http://java.sun.com and grab a copy of the *full* specification if you desire as well as specifications for new additions that are under review. If you think that standards only work when they come from non-profit standards organisations then perhaps you should look at the mess that is HTML these days and rethink how well international standards work.
If your only argument for C# is that it's open I think you a) have no clue about how to decide upon an appropriate programming language and b) are sorely mistaken about what is open and how useful it works.
Re:Closed standard? Open Standard? I pick door #2 (Score:2)
Given time I can come up with several examples, but lets go with one here: Basic is an open standard with lots of (varied) implementations. PICK is a language (among other things) that ended up looking rather like Basic after several evolutionary changes. Why did PICK evolve towards Basic? PICK was arguably better on several levels. But it was a closed, proprietary standard.
If you created your own version of PICK you couldn't call it PICK and you could not participate in the mind-share generated by PICK. But anyone (including Bill Gates) could create a version of Basic and call it 'Basic'. As a result everyone knew what it was. It was part of the idea space for Basic, even if it wasn't exactly a kosher 'Basic'. So Basic, despite being technically less powerful, ended up owning the most mind-share. In the marketplace of ideas it became something that was traded at a higher level. PICK could only keep up by following, because its mind-share was smaller.
Make no mistake; mind-share is important. Sun knows this. Microsoft knows this. There is no way Microsoft would be playing the game the way they are if they were not playing catch-up. In this case the real winners are the programmers of five years from now when idea convergence and the natural workings of the marketplace of ideas create a better technology.
First rule of civil debate: Attack the message, not the messenger. Personally I believe that I am fully capable of making such distinctions by using a rich and approprite set of heuristic comparisons which I need not detail here. Can you accept that and choose to disagree with me solely on the basis of my ideas and opinions? If so then you are trading in that 'marketplace of ideas' I keep blathering about. Otherwise you are only trading in insult and antipathy. I have nothing to offer in exchange there.
Jack William Bell
And behind #2 is... Java! (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, I'm talking about the Java language. Where else do you get something where the language and VM are controlled by a standards body composed of many companies across many industries, that have to approve all changes made (Sun only controls licencing of the Java trademark)? How about a standard where real everyday people like you and I can propose changes and make comments on proposed standards?
Wait, you were thinking you might get
Lastly, what's stopping you from writing everything on top of a raw turning machine? After all, everything you want to do is technically supported...
Check out calling conventions from Eiffel# to C# and then perhaps you'll rethink the usability of cross-language prgramming.
.
Very nice article. (Score:5, Interesting)
The author is saying pretty much what I figured, which is that
I would also make the case that "unsafe" mode/pointer arithmetic is a flaw, but that's not the matter at hand. The high point of the article were these two paragraphs in the conclusion:
"Playing with the
For those quick to make an ignorant response, he's not saying more radical structural departures are impossible, though many are - but more often that diverging "client languages" suffer in performance and, in many cases, have been "embraced and extended" in order to become compatible. He goes on:
"There are, actually, many successful "common language runtimes", with names like Pentium, SPARC and others. Mainstream CPUs are equally fitted to very different languages as they only do the most fundamental, low-level operations, so they cannot be biased towards particular languages. There aren't many different ways to perform a conditional branch. However, there are radically different ways to support methods and functions, or most constructs found in high-level languages. The consequence is that every language needs different compilers and runtimes to implement their features, and different libraries to support their vision of software development."
Re:Very nice article. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Very nice article. (Score:2)
Re:Very nice article. (Score:2)
Let's Play Devil's Advocate (Score:2, Interesting)
He lists numerous limitations of the CLR/CTS/CLS. Lets remember that
If Microsoft fails to deliver, we'll all have a great laugh. However, if Microsoft does deliver and MONO succeeds, we'll have an explostion of desperately needed applications that will run on Linux.
The worst thing that I can say about
I like this quote... (Score:3, Insightful)
Sounds like Sun selling Java. Proprietary openness, and strongly biased systems presented as platform-neutral.
Seems to be running (Score:2)
The site www.javalobby.org is running Orion/1.5.2 on Windows 2000
keep in mind (Score:2)
My experience with the Java VM (Score:2)
The whole thing ends up being awkward, and it is my impression that running code in a VM limits me as a programmer to the power of an inferior operating system. I DO like JSPs though.
CLR same as IBM's SOM (System Object Model)?? (Score:2, Interesting)
[ibm.com]
SOM 3.0 Readme
One thing I don't recall hearing about (Score:2, Interesting)
One question that I have not seen raised is this: It is easier to write programs for Linux and *BSD than it is to write programs for Windows. Many open-source programmers use this as an excuse for charging for the Windows versions of their products.
That said, why would anyone but a Windows programmer want to program for
Mono may support
I think if Sun's JVM supported other languages like Perl, Python, C, C++, etc.
I think the languages support in CLR are impressive, but still, if you have to write to a Windows-like API, what good does it do you?
Although there are a lot of things I like about
Instruction set language bias (Score:2)
You can implement anything using the MSIL instruction set. It may be less efficient for some things, but the same is true of all processor instruction sets.
Do we need MI support in the instruction set? The x86 instruction set doesn't have any particular instructions that are designed to support multiple inheritance, the C++ language standard defined how vtables and whatnot work to make it happen.
Is it just a matter of defining a similar standard for, say, Eiffel#?
(Is the x86 instruction set biased towards C/C++ code?)
- Steve
Yawn . . . (Score:4, Insightful)
1990 - Visual Basic revolutionized programming by interpreting to P-code and requiring a run-time.
1991 - Java was going to rock our worlds and promised "write once, run anywhere" using an intermediate byte code that looks a lot like P-code.
2002 - Microsoft promises one runtime to which many languages will compile in the megarevolutionary (and some say Orwellian) dot net architecture.
Like it was said in Ecclesiastes [gospelcom.net], there is nothing new under the sun.
should have been a comparison chart (Score:4, Interesting)
"CLR requires static single inheritance"
"CLR lacks multiple dispatch"
I certainly think that the CLR could stand the criticism and have its hype deflated, but I'm not finding a lot to recommend the JVM. Sun doesn't even acknowledge, much less support languages other than Java on the JVM, with the exception of GJ, which it would rather absorb than support.
I might also note that there are languages very much not like C# available for
Generic Types (Score:5, Informative)
Nobody has mentioned this yet, so I will. A research version of the CLR implements true generics, but because they only have limited resources, they decided not to include it in the first release. The following is quoted from this interview [oreilly.com] with Chief C# Language Architect Anders Hejlsberg:
Hejlsberg:
But with respect to the generics that you asked about, I definitely think generics are a very useful concept and you can certainly tell that from all the generics research that's taking place in academia and industry. Templates are one solution to the problem. In our internal discussions, we concluded that we wanted to do it right for this new platform. But what we would really like is to have generics understood by the underlying runtime. This is different from how some of the generic prototypes have been built. Take Java's notions of "erasure" where there's really no knowledge of generics in the system. By having the common language runtime understand the concept of generics, multiple languages can share the functionality. You can write a generic class in C# over in one place and someone else using a different language can use it. But making generics part of the runtime also enables you to do certain things much more efficiently. Instantiation of generics should ideally happen at runtime. With C++, instantiation of templates happens at compile time, and then you have two options: you can either let your code bloat or you can try, in the linker, to get rid of some of the bloat. But, if you have multiple applications, you can forget about it. You're just going to get bloated code.
If you push the knowledge of generics into the common language runtime, then the runtime can understand that when an application or a component asks for a list of "Foo's," it should first ask: "Do I already have an instantiation of a list of "Foo?" If so, use that one. Indeed, if Foo is a reference type, and if we do the design right, we can share the instantiation for all reference types. For value types, such as ints and floats, and we can create one instantiation per value type. But only when an application asks for it. We've done a lot of the design work and groundwork necessary to add generics to the runtime.
It's interesting you asked earlier about the IL because deciding to add generics impacts the design of the IL. If the instructions in the IL embed type information -- if, for example, an Add instruction is not an Add, but is an Add int or an Add float or an Add double -- then you've baked the type into the instruction stream and the IL is not generic at that point. Our IL format is actually truly type neutral. And, by keeping it type neutral, we can add generics later and not get ourselves into trouble, at least not as much trouble. That's one of the reasons our IL looks different from Java byte code. We have type neutral IL. The Add instruction adds whatever the two things are on top of the stack. In a generic world, that could translate into different code when the generic is instantiated.
Osborn: Is that available to all .NET languages?
Hejlsberg:
Yes. Microsoft Research in Cambridge has created a generics version of the common language runtime and the C# compiler. We're looking at how to move that forward right now. It's not going to happen in the first release, that much we know, but we are working on making sure that we do things right for the first release so that generics fit into the picture.
The LOTR reference is hauntingly correct! (Score:3, Funny)
Sounds just like it: Here, use these beautiful new "rings" (.NET), and all will be good. At least until I use my super-powers to control you when you least expect it.
Re:"One Runtime To Bind Them All" (Score:2, Informative)
Actually, the correct quote would be "One Runtime to rule them all, and in the darkness bind them."
In the land of Redmond, where shadows lie...
Re:The thing the author forgets....... (Score:2)
All languages are totally inappropriate for many projects. Your point should not be that C# is an inappropriate language of choice, but that any language is. A broad view would teach many languages, and since business applications ARE what most developers end up doing, there is no reason that C# shouldn't be one (if not the) language to be taught as that part of the broad view.
Re:The thing the author forgets....... (Score:2)
Inheritance has been shown to be troublesome if overused.
But if you are going to have OOP, it is hard to avoid, and any OOP language that doesn't support it is limited because of a decison the language designer, not the programmer is making.
Re:Block Innovation??? (Score:2)