[mono-vb] Future of Mono's VB.NET

[Miguel de Icaza]

Hello,

> Forking is generally a dead-end for code sharing. That's what happened
> to mbas. That's what will eventually happen to mbas2 I guess. At some
> point the two versions just diverge so much that the gap just gets too
> scary.

This I disagree with, because this assumes that the fork is not
maintained, and also assumes that we can not refactor or share any code
between gmcs and mbas2.

For instance, gmcs today is a full fork of mcs, a fork that nowadays is
updated on every change to mcs so that both compilers remain in parity.
This fork was done because the addition of generics were consider at the
time to be an unstable change (2003).

In the discussion I had with Rafael, the idea would be to keep this
going on.

In fact, in Mono today we have a few other "forks", one of them being
the JIT engine (the new IL representation) and we synchronize the
changes every week or so.

As for refactoring, we have done some of that work on mcs/gmcs, and the
idea is to have them share source files in the future.   Using a
combination of refactoring and partial classes to accomplish this.

The same could be done with mbas.

Again, I do not know much about Boo, but generics is not a simple
addition, it has taken us a very long time to get it to the point we are
today, and VB could get a boost just from this (we started in early
2003).

The same will apply to LINQ extensions, we will be investing in gmcs to
do this, and it seems mbas2 could ride on this tail.

Using Boo is probably a good idea, but I will need more technical
convincing :-)

Miguel