Re: Mono and GNOME. The long reply.

[Miguel de Icaza <miguel ximian com>]

> > 	The CIL has one feature not found in Java though: it is
> >     byte code representation that is powerful enough to be used as a
> >     target for many languages: from C++, C, Fortran and Eiffel to Lisp
> >     and Haskell including things like Java, C#, JavaScript and Visual
> >     Basic in the mix.
> I do not know about _all_ these languages. But there is a lot of 
> implementations of different languages based on JVM:
> http://flp.cs.tu-berlin.de/~tolk/vmlanguages.html.
> How can you claim Java bytecode is not "powerful enough"?
> It is just not true. 

As Alan pointed out, Java is turing complete, but so is Tcl.  

Imagine that every compiler in the world targeted Tcl as its back-end
language.  Probably the only language that would run at acceptable speed
is Tcl.  I am of course dramatizing here, but you get the idea.

Java byte codes are powerful enough that you can run anything on that. 
But a series of languages will be very hard to support efficiently (C,
C++, Fortran in one end and Haskell and Lisp on the other one).

As I said, Microsoft took Java and went to language vendors and asked
`What do you need me to add to make your work simpler'.  And that turned
out to be the CIL.

> Also, in the statement there are few if any comments regarding
> SOAP/GNOME perspective. Will SOAP eventually replace CORBA/IIOP?

I am glad you noticed that.  It was done on purpose, because I did not
want my text to blur SOAP and Web Services into the mix.

SOAP is useful for some applications (Web Services are great with it),
but it would be hard and maybe even slow to use as a replacement to
CORBA on the desktop.

I would not use CORBA for Web Services though.

Miguel.