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December 2003 - Posts

2004 and me

Seen a few blog roap maps so before 2004 arrives I figured its a good time to say what I would like to cover in 2004.

  • More Rotor, non stop, every day.
  • Linux Rotor port, so much to do (more on that at a later date).
  • MySQL/Mono/Yukon (more on that at a later date as well)
  • More C/C++ and Assembly, 2004 will hopefully be the year I can plug the gaps in what I know about these (will need to for points 2 and 3)
  • LISP/CLOS, after a couple of years away I want to get back to coding in Lisp, the CLOS system is just so cool.
  • Ruby, another rocker of an object system, want to learn more about that in 2004.
  • Compiler work, more on that at a later date as well.
  • Parrot, with Perl/Python going to a VM model (and Ruby and PHP also set to join) it will be interesting to see what happens in that language space between Parrot, CLR and JVM. I for for one am keen to see what lessons can be learned from a VM such as Parrot to help the CLR broaden its language support.
2004 is also the year I will getting married :) So much to do, so little time. Happy 2004 to you all.
X# the details
I was wondering what the design goals of the now dead X# sharp project and this presentation shows what MS had in mind. That is make XSD, XPath, XML and SQL all first class citizens of a language that had the look and feel of C#. The presentation showed some interesting features and I liked the idea of crossing data languages with that of language like C#. I can see why X# as language was scrapped when its features could so easily be a part of the existing MS compiler set (C#,C++, VB.NET). No word yet on what MS have in mind, I guess it will be post Whidby . Hopefully we see these starting life (as Generics did) as an addition to the Rotor code base.
Adding a new managed class to Rotor
Joel has a great post on adding a managed class to Rotor, from his comments I noticed Dominic Cooney also some code on this subject. All worth a look.
Rotor Notes

Ben Rush has started taking some notes on how the runtime and types are loaded in Rotor.

Free UML tool for VS
As part of my search for a freeware UML tool for .NET I came across this add-in for VS, its only basics at the moment but would be a great point on which start a opensource project (if the author was interested).
New Rotor GC
Here is a interesting research project that aims to replace the current GC in Rotor with the JMTk (Java Memory Management Toolkit in Java). JMTk is the result of a lot of GC research and ties it all togther in one toolkit. My guess is that the Rotor port will be a direct Java to C++ translation of the tookit. Not looked in any great detail at research papers yet but it will interesting to see how its performance compares to the standard Rotor GC (even more interesting to see how it compares to the Rotor v2 GC).
Can X# live on
X# as a research project is dead according to Microsoft, with features from the project making there way into the .NET Framework, C# and VB.NET. It will be interesting to see what those features are (and indeed if they will make there way into Rotor). What X# could have brought to .NET would have been interesting to see, does anyone know of any other research projects that aim to achieve the same thing and indeed what the design goals, objectives of X# were? If the project is dead there is no harm in knowing the details.
.Net Security Best Practices to NH .Net Users Group
My friend and master coder Robert is giving a talk on .NET security best practices to NH .NET Users Group, it will be a great session and I am looking foward to seeing the slides from the talk, all the best with that Robert.
Rotor v2 info

Joe Pobar blogs some info on whats expected in the next version of Rotor, it will be based on the whidby CLR source (and indeed is being created by the same team). As before it will be an implementation of the ECMA CLI and C# specs, not sure if the additions to the CLR/C# (Generics etc) will be part of the spec by then but Joe indicates they will be there. Hopefully as before we also see code that additional to the CLI/C# such as the JScript compiler etc. If you can't wait until v2.0 for the additions to the CLR/C# then you can at the very least see Generics at work in the v1 Rotor code with Gyro. Thanks to Robert for the heads up on Joes post.

Update Sam has some great info on Brad's posts on Rotor v2

Distributed Virtual Machines: Inside the Rotor CLI
Hope this comes out soon, Gary Nutts new book on Rotor.
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