[Mono-devel-list] Re: some questions about your mono work!

[A Rafael D Teixeira]

>From: Josef El-Rayes <j.el-rayes at daemon.li>
>
>i am currently writing a bachelor thesis about opensource .NET ...
>... about your work. as i read you are currently working on mono basic.

Nowadays, Marco Ridoni (marco.ridoni at virgilio.it) is doing most of the hard 
work in MonoBASIC.
But I throw some lines of code at it when I have time to breath.

>how would you describe the current status of monobasic ?

You can do some vb.net programming with it, but lots of important features 
are still missing.

>how stable is it, how far are you from making it a "1.0 release"?

Just guessing: I would say the grammar is some 80% done, but the whole 
compiler is more like 50% done. Besides we lack a whole bunch of complex 
supporting code in the runtime assembly Microsoft.VisualBasic.dll to achieve 
useable late-bound coding.

>what are/were the biggest problems you are facing at doing your work?

Personally, I'm having little time to work on it. I used to have some 20 
hours-a-week to dedicate to Mono, now I have no more than 4 hours-a-week to 
read all email and try to code a bit.

Technically, we are having trouble understanding the undocumented runtime 
assembly to make an usefull replacement, one that can work for programs 
compiled with MS' vb.net compiler.

>what are you planning to work on or in which direction do you think the
>project itself will evolve?

We want to be fully compatible with VB.NET 1.0, but we are already 
implementing some extended behavior, like Iterators, without waiting for 
what MS may be cooking.

The idea is to have all of what C# is getting for it's future version, and 
then some advanced features
(in the lines of what Ruby and Python 2.2 have)

Happy Hackings,

Rafael Teixeira
Brazilian Polymath
Mono, MonoQLE Hacker

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