[Mono-dev] gmcs and The Future

[Jb Evain]

Hey,

On 2/4/09, Scott Peterson <scott at ssblack.co.nz> wrote:
>  Mcs has done an excellent job of tracking the official C#
>  language, and it will continue to do so, but the Mono project has a
>  world-class compiler entirely at its disposal. We need not confine
>  ourselves to the blessed specs of Microsoft or Ecma. We could "trick
>  out" C#, indulging in sugars of our own device, so long as we keep our
>  creations in -langversion:future. Those projects which are willing to
>  sacrifice compatibility with csc in order to partake of our forbidden
>  fruit can write code in this New C#. This C#++. This
>  -langversion:future.

I'd be very cautious with that idea. I've been told enough that mcs is
a `production` compiler :)

I mean, sure it's fun to experiment language changes and improvement.
But who decides what will go in and what not? And when it's in, who is
going to maintain it? Most people that will work on a patch for the
fun of it won't maintain the feature for a long time. If it's
perfectly ok for a feature that is needed, or for some libraries, it's
not really the case of mcs. Then it triggers some questions, like what
if a change to the parser (or some place else) for a `future` feature
gets in the way of a fix for the normal version of mcs?

Anyway, am not completely against the idea, I already wrote about how
I'd like to have a more extensible mcs, but in the current state of
affairs, again, I'd very cautious.

-- 
Jb Evain  <jb at nurv.fr>