Two New Microsoft Compilers Written in VB

Posted by Jonathan Allen on May 31, 2007

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Development

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.NET ,

Silverlight

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DLR

In the past there have been many complaints about Visual Basic being a second-class citizen to C# and that Microsoft never uses it internally. Those complaints are being addressed by SilverLight in numerous ways.

First of all, C# won't be fully supported in Silverlight. Unlike VB, Python, Ruby, and JavaScript, C# does not support the Dynamic Language Runtime and cannot be hosted for runtime compilation in Silverlight.

In more recent news, it was revealed that Visual Basic 10 would have a compiler written in Visual Basic. While Mono has a self-hosting compiler for VB, this is the first time in the history of Visual Basic that Microsoft released a VB compiler written in VB.

Even more interesting, the next version of Microsoft's JavaScript compiler, known by the brand name JScript, was also written in Visual Basic.

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   No C# on Silverlight?

   by Werner Schuster

   I'm not sure I understand this part about C# not being available on Silverlight... does that mean the C# compiler doesn't run on Silverlight? LINQ and other libs are available for Silverlight, so I'm a bit confused;

   Reply

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   Re: No C# on Silverlight?

   by Jonathan Allen

   Silverlight can certainly use libraries compiled with C#.
   
   What Silverlight cannot do is grab a block of C# source code and compile it in the browser at runtime using the DLR. How important this is remains to be seen, but if you are a fan of code that writes itself (e.g. LISP, JavaScript) it is a consideration.

   Reply

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   Re: No C# on Silverlight?

   by Werner Schuster

   OK, that clears that up. Thanks.
   Of course, as long as it ships with the CodeDOM (I think that's their name) libraries, then generating code is still possible (see vistasmalltalk.wordpress.com/ for an impressive example of that).

   Reply

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