AW: [mono-vb] Future of Mono's VB.NET - Fork vs. Inherits

[Jochen Wezel - CompuMaster GmbH]

Hi,

>>>
    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".
>>>

One thought on making a fork: when we consider to make a fork for the new mbas2, we might run into the same problem as last time: 
Mbas has been build on mcs version of a given date. (g)mcs had been improved and mbas hasn't benefitted from these changes since these days. 
Now, the mbas development state is fairly poor compared to mcs because mbas hasn't had the man power as mcs had.

In words of VB: Is there a possibility to "inherit" permanently from the gmcs compiler and just "override" required methods with a VB.Net version or to provide an additional VB2C# layer that transforms all commands from the VB world to the underlying C#-compiler-engine?

-Jochen


-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: mono-vb-bounces at lists.ximian.com [mailto:mono-vb-bounces at lists.ximian.com] Im Auftrag von Miguel de Icaza
Gesendet: Donnerstag, 20. April 2006 15:52
An: mono-vb at lists.ximian.com
Betreff: [mono-vb] Future of Mono's VB.NET

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.
_______________________________________________
Mono-vb mailing list
Mono-vb at lists.ximian.com
http://lists.ximian.com/mailman/listinfo/mono-vb