10 April 2003

ECMA / ISO. [Jesse Ezell Blog]   Another person has to open his mouth and blab about how Microsoft isn't really opening up the specs... I get tired of this nonsense from people who should know better...   Gotta agree with Jesse here, I think Jeremy is confusing Rotor and the specs them selves.  As Jesse quite rightly points out if what Jeremy says is true then Mono would not exist (indeed neither would DotGNU). The specs are open to anyone and you can use them to build C# compilers and CLR implementations (as have Mono and DotGNU).   While Jesse makes a valid point on the Flash SDK license I think Macromedia's involvement in open source projects (Axis and Rhino) is worth taking into account.   Update   Jeremy have posted the following in the comments.   Thanks for posting that clarifying quote about the RAND license. That is a real change, and earlier interpretations assumed that RAND = money. I know when I met with the Ximian folks they were more or less working in the dark, waiting to get a legal letter from MSFT. It seems that MSFT have made a good decision here.   Kudos to Jesse for pointing this out. I do wonder why Jeremy has met with Miguel and the Ximian folks,  interested in it a possible web service platform? or was it Macromedia related....curious :) 1:57:54 PM    comment []

So what is "Pure X" anyway?. - [Squawks of the Parrot] ..amongst the .NET folks there was some noting of "Well, what about S#"? S# is a version of Smalltalk for .NET, by David Simmons of SmallScript fame. Now, David's a darned smart guy, and he's done a lot of interesting stuff. I've heard him speak at a number of conferences, most recently at OOPSLA '02, where he talked about the stuff he's done to get smalltalk running on .NET. Which he's done. But... Most of his talk was how he subverted .NET with add-on code to actually do what he wanted. The S# compiler doesn't generate code that will run on a stock .NET system--you have to have the add-on executable library pieces that he wrote to get around the limits of .NET's design (some of those limits were intentional, which is fine) and S# programs won't run as trusted code because they call out to DLLs outside the .NET core. Basically, he cheated. Which is fine. I rather like cheating. But is it really pure .NET code? As he did in the comments of my S# posts Dan makes an interesting point here (he also makes the same point about Swing and the JVM). If the CLR has limits then the only way to overcome it is to go external but then is the code trusted (and indeed what will the speed trade off be). The most interesting point of all is that you will have no need to do this in Parrot, by design its already in. I sure hope that MS are keeping track of this, as it stands Parrot looks set to be the true cross language, cross platform VM. 9:05:27 AM    comment []