Andrew Stopford's Weblog

Rotor is "shared source." ;)

There are open source implementations of the spec, but
what we (Thies gets blame too) mean is that the IL/Java specs are rather closed. If we wanted a change in the specification, what process would we have to go through?

Does it mean I would have to wait for a large commitee to agree on something, and then wait even longer for the respective implementations to catch up? Would they even meet for lunch with me?
With Parrot, the folks are dedicated and extremely helpful, and there is very little death by committee... Its open source, we make our case to the community, and it seems the Parrot people are very dedicated in providing a solution.

Also, Mono and .NET don't run on nearly as many platforms as Perl and PHP. There capabilities to host IL and the full CLR are much less than Perl or PHP.

Sterling: as both Miguel and me have pointed out a few times on the mono list when the discussion came up, ECMA will standardize existing implementations: if you need changes to the CLR to better support PHP or other dynamic languages, you can propose them on the mono lists. We can also implement them in mono or help you implement them (of course once people agree the changes are good and useful). Mono is free software and it's an excellent platform to test implementations of changes to better fit the CLR for dynamic lanaguages.
As for hosting, mono has a fairly complete embedding API that is already used also by commercial programs.
What is currently missing in the CLR is the input of the dynamic language developers about what changes would be needed. If you're still in Italy and want to hop on a train to Padova one of the next weekends, I'd love to discuss issues with you and meet for lunch (I'm not on the standard committee, but Miguel is and we can make him push the proposals:-).

Thanks for comments Sterling and Paolo, Paolo how about that blog ;-)

If you do discuss then please share your thoughts and conclusions with world. Its important that in order to make the CLR better that we take on this kind of feedback. Indeed I feel it would be good that this kind of feedback is fed in other CLR implementations, I am sure Rhys and P.Net folks would be interested and I can help out on getting it into Rotor.