[Mono-list] Surveys: Mono 1.0 and Mono Conference.

[A Rafael D Teixeira]

>From: Rob.Tillie@Student.tUL.EDU
>
> > By the way: I think, we should also provide all the needed stuff for
> > VB.NET in Mono 1.0. This is because more developers in the ASP.NET scene
> > are developing in VB.NET than in C# since the most developers are coming
> > from ASP with VBSCRIPT. If VB.NET would be missing, I see the risk that
> > many developers wouldn't come back in a future release.
>
>I was thinking about that too. Does anyone have a clue of the time 
>necessary
>for implementing a VB.NET compiler?

mbas just needs someone more focused on it than me, to be completed, 
estabilized in say 2 or 3 months. Well having to support late-binding makes 
it a bit more difficult to estimate, as it  is something that  is not 
present on mcs, that is our comparable project.

>How long did the C# compiler take?

Nearly an year, from the top of my mind, but some bugs are still being 
ironed out today.

However, mbas has a lot already done. Aside from late-binding (what is 
unluckily a necessity given how it is abused by my former fellow VB/VBScript 
programmers), we are still missing some sintactic constructs and a bit more 
of code-generation behind the existing constructs.

To comprehend better: mbas is a fork of mcs, initially I proposed to Miguel 
that mcs could be a multi-language compiler, but later we found it could put 
burdens on the base classes, because of semantic differences 
(case-sensitivity, overloads resolution ordering, being different for each 
language).

So it has lots of (outdated, it is true) code from a quite useable version 
of mcs, from some time ago.
My dream was to refactor both compilers afterward to be able to share again 
componentized pieces of code, but that is surely of lower priority. than 
being feature-complete, robust and fast.

Anyway I agree with Jochen that  mbas is needed in 1.0 to captivate asp.net 
developers from the Windows world.

Desktop developers are more evenly divided between VB.NET and C#, at least 
here in Brazil, but surely the lack of WinForms is even more of a 
showstopper for those WinDevs, unless you can get good GTK# form 
designers/conversion wizards inside VS.NET...

Cheers,

Rafael Teixeira
Brazilian Polymath
Mono Hacker since 16 Jul 2001
English Blog: http://monoblog.blogspot.com/
Brazilian Portuguese Blog: http://monoblog.weblogger.terra.com.br/

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