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News
Two New Microsoft Compilers Written in VB
Posted by Jonathan Allen on May 31, 2007 12:30 AM
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
Posted
May 31, 2007 10:29 AM
Re: No C# on Silverlight?
by
Jonathan Allen
Posted
May 31, 2007 11:49 AM
Re: No C# on Silverlight?
by
Werner Schuster
Posted
May 31, 2007 1:54 PM
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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;
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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.
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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 http://vistasmalltalk.wordpress.com/ for an impressive example of that).
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