From: Nat Pryce Date: 2001-10-03T10:39:30+09:00 Subject: [ruby-talk:21971] Re: Let's work on Windows support > I have briefly tried to understand .NET, and don't, so I may be wrong. > But judging from the fact that there are .NET versions of different > languages, I have to assume that .NET is yet another attempt by > Micros**t to make everything run only on MS, and to destroy all > branches of computer culture which don't rely on MS and use MS > proprietary standards. Unless there's been a shift in their corporate > strategy unlike any other such shift in the history of corporations, > that would be a reasonable assumption. > > Therefore, I don't see how it can be good for Ruby. I'm not trying to > start an argument here; I'm just reasoning from what we know about > Micros**t. The CLR component of .NET is no more than a common virtual machine for different languages -- think of it as a high-level, architecture neutral Windows API. If a Ruby interpreter can be written for the JVM it can be written for the CLR. It won't affect the language definition, or give Microsoft control over the evolution of the language, any more than writing a Ruby interpreter that calls Win32 API functions would do. The drawback to implementing Ruby on the CLR would be that the implementation would not share a common code base with the pure C implementation, and so it would be hard for it to keep track of Ruby's evolution. Advatages would be a simpler, faster implementation (as far as I understand it) because the CLR implements garbage collection, threads, polymorphic dispatch, and JIT compilation for faster code. Cheers, Nat.