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

[Jambunathan K]

>>>
    To make things worse, the new VB.NET supports generics.   So we are
wondering whether it would not be a better idea to start a fresh fork
from gmcs (along the same proposal that Jambunathan had a year or so
ago) and implement VB that way.  Lets call this effort "mbas2".
>>>

Emotionally this appeals to me.

The following items favor this proposal:

1. VB.NET is not "standardized". This is to our advantage for we can scope
and define what mono's VB.NET will or will not support.

 We can leave out certain constructs like supporting error numbers or
mapping error numbers to exceptions. Going down to the last detail as in
retaining error numbers across vbc and mbas2 would be seriously detrimental
to progress and should be avoided at all costs.

In short,  the implementation should be in spirit rather than in true
literal sense.

2. We build on an existing infrastructure that is rock solid and equivalent
if not better in power. Yet we are starting from scratch in that all C#
compiler constructs will be passed through a "VB.NET" filter and refactored.

In short we would be standing on giant's shoulders.

3. If we decide to go down this path, we need to go with surgical precision
starting from expressions and working all the way up to higher semantic
units like delegates. (This in my IMHO is where mbas had seriously failed.)

In short it is a marathon and so it should be treated. Any desire for quick
results would be against the rules of the game.

4. gmcs and mbas2 trees should be twins till such time as mbas2 relies on
gmcs for borrowing major features. If gmcs is reasonably mature this would
neither be a big overhead nor a major challenge.

All 1-4 were the philosophy behind bmcs as it started as a fork of  gmcs. I
stuck to these principles for close to 3 months when I was comitting
bottomline patches to the bmcs tree. This is refelected in the ChangeLogs.

>>>
    The idea would be to go in chunks: we could integrate individual
commits that were done to the old mbas tree, and determine one by one
whether it applies to mbas2.
>>>

Miguel as someone who has worked on mbas and who has personally worked and
intreacted with Anirban (the then mbas owner) I can say with certainty that
this would be an exercise that would not only be time consuming but would
also be of little value add.

Even if we decide to go down this path, we would miss nothing if we restrict
the patches to those that were committed before Anirban took over.

Neither am I a C# or VB.NET programmer (in the remotest sense) nor am I am
compiler guru. I am making these observations as a practitioner and as
someone who spared some sincere love over mbas/bmcs.


Cheers,
Jambunathan K.




On 4/20/06, Miguel de Icaza <miguel at novell.com> wrote:
>
> Hey,
>
>     Yesterday I met with Rafael and we discussed a bit what we wanted to
> do with Mono's VB compiler.
>
>     The situation is that today's VB compiler is based on a fork of mcs
> circa 2002.  And although some of the improvements to mcs made it into
> mbas, they were not all incorporated.
>
>     To make things worse, the new VB.NET supports generics.   So we are
> wondering whether it would not be a better idea to start a fresh fork
> from gmcs (along the same proposal that Jambunathan had a year or so
> ago) and implement VB that way.  Lets call this effort "mbas2".
>
>     The idea would be to go in chunks: we could integrate individual
> commits that were done to the old mbas tree, and determine one by one
> whether it applies to mbas2.
>
>     Maybe not all of the code can be salvaged, but if we can get even
> 40% of the old code migrated into the new tree it would be a big plus.
>
>     Now, this might be insane, because once I was talking to someone on
> the VB.NET team and when I told them how mbas was written he said "I did
> not think that VB.NET could be implemented that way".   Maybe our
> approach is completely busted, but I do not know enough about VB.NET to
> know.  I just know that if the original mbas idea made sense, we should
> probably start from scratch.
>
>     Now, since we are already too close to 1.2, we should probably
> develop this on a separate tree, to avoid breaking the build of
> "mono/mcs", so it should be another top level module in the Mono
> repository.  And we should probably also kill "mcs/bmcs" (at least we
> could retrieve the few patches that were done there).
>
> Miguel.
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