Re: Mono and GNOME. The long reply.

[Alan Cox <alan redhat 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.

This statement is incorrect. Java is turing complete. There isnt a good
compiler back end because nobody bothered to write one. In the gcc case
its incredibly hard as gcc really isnt stack oriented.

> 	So no longer should a software engineer pick Fortran, because
>     that is the only language where his math libraries are available:
>     he can now pick the right language for the problem at hand.

This is already true. They use fortran because it has certain very specific
language properties that make it faster for numeric operations than other
languages. I doubt a .net bytecode system can extract that performance
once you have lost the fortran properties. The .net system cannot properly
represent the implicit vectorisation and parallelism properties of fortran
so the bytecode procssors cannot re-extract them.

>     re-implementation of the Unix kernel.  Before the advent of Linux
>     and the Berkeley Unix, Unix was a proprietary technology, built by
>     ATT (which back in the day, was a monopoly).  

Berkeley Unix goes back to about v6, which predates even stuff like stdio.

>     or ourselves.  I want to be as compatible as possible with the
>     APIs that were published by Microsoft.

Be assured that the day they decide you are a nuisance the VM will acquire
a patented neat feature that kills you off. Just ask the Samba people.

> 	Without Nat I would probably have gone crazy by now.   

He didnt save you 8)

Alan