Cross-Platform CLR!

Published 04 May 07 02:50 PM | Sam Gentile

I have been preaching for 7 years now about that the CLI/CLR was designed for cross-platform and the rest was packaging. Today, the news from MIX ‘07 was very exciting on the CLR front as well as many other fronts (to be covered later). Today that become concrete with the announcement of full CLR support for Silverlight on Windows and the Mac!! Yes, that’s right I can write the same C#/BCL code on both platforms!! Whatsmore I can use IronRuby! Some of Jason’s bullet items:

4.       You get the same CLR from the desktop, just factored for size.  This isn’t an interpreter.  You get the desktop JIT and GC for superior code performance.  Because we support generics and runtime type helpers (Reflection et al), we get LINQ support too.  Finally you will be able to use Visual Studio for debugging on both the Windows *and* the Mac.

5.       Let’s repeat that again:  it runs on the Mac.  And you can do full x-debugging from Visual Studio.  That’s worth its own bullet J

6.       Your favorite languages are supported on the client.  C# and VB.Net work out of the box.  With the new DLR, we have support for IronPython, IronRuby, Javascript, and the new dynamic VBx compiler.  It is called the Common Language Runtime for a reason and we are raising the bar with Silverlight.

I’m rocking out to Neon Knights by Black Sabbath from the album Live Evil - Remastered

Comments

# John Spurlock said on May 1, 2007 01:45 AM:

"Yes, that's right I can write the same C#/BCL code on both platforms!! "

Not exactly.  The BCL is (as one might expect) slimmed down to meet the 4MB download - although linq made the cut!  Reflector into the install (C:\Program Files\Microsoft Silverlight) to see for yourself what's in/out.

Interestingly enough, unless I missed something, System.Data is nowhere to be found in the alpha release, not even a "slimmed down" version (ala System.Xml.Core)

# Tom Opgenorth said on May 1, 2007 01:55 AM:

How does this compare to Mono?  

# Bjorn Reppen said on May 22, 2007 12:48 PM:

Ok, so itj's just packaging??

So, why don't you start packaging for linux then?

# Sam Gentile said on May 22, 2007 01:23 PM:

Who's "you?" Do I like like the packaging manager????

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