8 ms·

Introduction to the Common Language Runtime (2007)

143 points by StylifyYourBlog 12y ago

Too 12y ago
Look at the repository the file belongs to. :)
- Udo 12y ago
  I have no idea who Vilius Kairys is, care to elaborate?
  - josteink 12y ago
    The repo. It's coreclr. .NET is now open source to the core.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - worldsayshi 12y ago
      It seems that it also works on linux? So it works as a replacement for Mono then? I guess the compilers are missing. But I guess you can use the mono compilers and then clr.
      - math 12y ago
        They open sourced their compilers earlier: https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn
        worldsayshi 12y ago
        build:failing :/
tkubacki 12y ago
Mono team is now actively merging this into Mono (see Miguel De Icaza github) - this is very good news for .NET
peferron 12y ago
From the article: "A GC is necessary to provide memory safety guarantees. [...] For any programs that need heap-style memory allocations, if you want to guarantee memory safety, you need a GC." The main clame to fame of Rust is providing memory safety without a GC. Is the quote wrong, or is the quote still right because using a few unsafe blocks is unavoidable in practice? I haven't used Rust yet and know almost nothing about the language, so I'd be glad if someone could enlighten me.
- tel 12y ago
  "To ensure memory safety [given that you can't guarantee in the language layer that the bytecode we'll be operating is safe] you need a GC" Rust invalidates the bracketed assumption. It's been known this is possible for a long time, but Rust is the first time a language with this capability has hit semi-mainstream audiences. C# sure doesn't do it, VB certainly doesn't do it! Ultimately it comes down to a promise of conceptual cleansliness from the entirety of a language Frontend. It's a big commitment.
  - chinpokomon 12y ago
    Isn't this saying that because the MSIL is generated from C#, VB.Net, F#, etc, that there can be no guarantee? As far as I know, Rust isn't compiling to a CLR, so the GC in .Net is happening at a lower level than the language, it's happening in the runtime.
    - tel 12y ago
      GC is almost certainly best handled in the RTS if you're going to expect to have one. In theory, Rust could pick MSIL as a new target and then they'd pay overhead for a GC which is not useful at all. Alternatively, due to the existence of the GC as a given in the CLR, it might be that manual memory isn't exposed (as well or as nicely) in the MSIL making the idea of targeting Rust to it kind of silly. I have no personal clue.
      - ygra 12y ago
CmonDev 12y ago
Also known as The Best Virtual Machine. It would be nice to see the 64-bit Mono vs JVM vs V8 (or whatever monkey it's called this time) in a year or so. .NET CLR was already destroying every other on Win (even before RyuJIT and SIMD and native compilation), now Linux will be covered as well.
- nbevans 12y ago
  You are wholly correct but even still, sadly, you can expect a barrage of down votes for stating the truth.
- nercury 12y ago
  I think the JavaScript virtual machines are amazing. Thanks to browser speed wars, they pulled out a trick that I would not have thought possible - making JavaScript fast as hell. Calling V8 "whatever monkey" is a bit ignorant. Oh, I haven't said that JavaScript is a good language :)
  - aselzer 12y ago
    I believe the comment meant V8 and {Spider,Trace,Jäger}Monkey (the Mozilla JS engine), which nowadays even beats V8 in some benchmarks. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpiderMonkey_%28software%29#TraceMonkey http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpiderMonkey_%28software%29#Tra...
  - _random_ 12y ago
    Unfortunately it pushed the industry on the wrong path. Now everyone is coming app with transpilable super-sets and some folks are even pushing the unmaintainable code to the previously safe server-side (node, meteor etc.).
    - k__ 12y ago
      Yes. Just look what Lars Bak did with JavaScript. If he would work on the CLR, things could get really awesome.
JBiserkov 12y ago
>fundamentally only simple things can be easy
Rapzid 12y ago
Very nice. I'm wondering and hoping that Microsoft will start releasing design/architecture documentation and walkthroughs. Something that's sorely lacking from most open source projects is any sort of documentation to help would-be contributors get up to speed and wrap their heads around things. On a lot of smaller projects it's not a huge deal, but some of the new dotnet foundation stuff is MASSIVE.
- MichaelGG 12y ago
  Yeah this is great. I'm really looking forward to detailed docs and explanations of some of the more low level and not-so-publicly understood parts. For instance, AFAICT, the whole double locking initialization question doesn't have a sold public answer. It's unsure that "myfield = new Foo()" is totally safe if the constructor throws. Obviously that'd be a huge flaw if not safe, but even top C# experts don't seem to be sure. With a fully open source CLR and docs, we should be able to figure this stuff out, rather than finding a few things of blog posts from 2004 and guessing. We could also learn why some things are the way they are. For instance, why can you lock (Monitor) on every object? The syncblock on each object can't be free, so why is this encoded into each object (or even available at all), versus dedicated sync objects (which are what gets used in practice, anyways). And maybe someone will provide much needed enhancements, like a way to effectively use the stack when safe. Or maybe some research projects will add advanced type features, which spark the way forward into the actual implementation. I'm very much looking forward to this and really hope it marks a new era beyond hassle-free use on Linux.
_random_ 12y ago
2016-s default gentlemen's choice: Azure, Win10, Docker, CoreCLR, ASP.NET Web API, F#, TypeScript.
- MichaelGG 12y ago
  Azure is a nice offering, pretty slick. But the costs of compute on Azure are literally 200% of Google Cloud Compute Engine. And the performance of GCE is also better. I'm very anti Google, and I had dismissed GCE out of hand. But then I looked into it and tried it out and I'm blown away. VMs launch like instantly, and are much faster than their Azure counterparts. Niceties, like SSH in the browser really are cute, too. And, each machine can have a public IP, instead of Azure's quirky "cloud service" one IP limitation. But pricing, that's what kills you. While Azure makes a big deal about how they match pricing, it's only on the storage/transfer sides. The same specs on Azure are 200% more money. The same performance is... a lot more money. I think it's cause the main tier of Azure runs on some older AMD series, but GCE is running Ivy/Sandy bridge. As a longtime Azure user, I was rather distressed to find I was paying so much more for less. Even after the discounts MS had for 6 or 12 month commits, their pricing is still far more. Also s/TypeScript/WebSharper.
std_throwaway 12y ago
I'm wondering how this relates to LLVM or JAVA bytecode.
moomin 12y ago
Just to point out that, as much as the CLR was specced as cross-language, it's damn hard to run Java on it, Python and Ruby are abandoned, no-one's even tried Haskell.
- Solarsail 12y ago
  Isn't this a general problem of cross-language VMs? Different languages need different object models, and different data representations. [0] At least according to one Parrot developer, the Parrot object model was one of the biggest pain points for porting JS/Ruby/Python to Parrot... Where that object model was meant to be universal, and work for any language. [1] That said, IronPython does still semi-exist [2], and I'm not sure how well JRuby handles interoperability with Java or Jython... [0] One former dev on one of the Iron* languages posted on reddit about how the CLR failed on its cross language ambitions. I can't find the post, but they gradually found it was mostly C# centric anyways, and ports of other languages were mostly incompatible and second-class [1] http://whiteknight.github.io/2015/01/15/parrottheend.html http://whiteknight.github.io/2015/01/15/parrottheend.html [2] http://ironpython.net/announcements/ http://ironpython.net/announcements/ for what it's worth...
  - larsberg 12y ago
    It's a hard problem, which the COMPlus team knew when they started out. During the early pre-release period, there was a then-NDA-only project, Project 7, which gave grants to people trying to port both commercial languages like perl and academic languages like scheme. I was at Northwestern, where we got a Project 7 grant to work on a scheme implementation (under Ian Horswill, done by Pinku Surana in my group) and scheme language service (done by me). We provided a lot of feedback, but it's tough for a group of a couple of students (or in the case of Perl, one commercial dev) to keep up with the then massive-breaking-changes drops we'd get from DevDiv every 3 months or so and provide feedback when it was on stuff that was, to the developers, around 6 months old. Often, by the time feedback landed, it was "too late" to incorporate because of product cycles and got postponed. Or the stuff we'd request was a dupe of "add tail call instruction" which had been postponed long before any of us got started in Project 7. I say this as somebody who then graduated and then went to work in DevDiv for the next 7 years, where I was treated very well, so I certainly have no axes to grind on that front :-)
mmf 12y ago
Wait a second. Isn't the elefant in the room the fact that Microsoft is open sourcing a core piece of their software? And MIT license!!! What's happening?

Too 12y ago

Look at the repository the file belongs to. :)

Udo 12y ago
I have no idea who Vilius Kairys is, care to elaborate?
- josteink 12y ago
  The repo. It's coreclr. .NET is now open source to the core.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - worldsayshi 12y ago
    It seems that it also works on linux? So it works as a replacement for Mono then? I guess the compilers are missing. But I guess you can use the mono compilers and then clr.
    - math 12y ago
      They open sourced their compilers earlier: https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn
      - worldsayshi 12y ago
        build:failing :/

tkubacki 12y ago

Mono team is now actively merging this into Mono (see Miguel De Icaza github) - this is very good news for .NET

peferron 12y ago

From the article: "A GC is necessary to provide memory safety guarantees. [...] For any programs that need heap-style memory allocations, if you want to guarantee memory safety, you need a GC." The main clame to fame of Rust is providing memory safety without a GC. Is the quote wrong, or is the quote still right because using a few unsafe blocks is unavoidable in practice? I haven't used Rust yet and know almost nothing about the language, so I'd be glad if someone could enlighten me.

tel 12y ago
"To ensure memory safety [given that you can't guarantee in the language layer that the bytecode we'll be operating is safe] you need a GC" Rust invalidates the bracketed assumption. It's been known this is possible for a long time, but Rust is the first time a language with this capability has hit semi-mainstream audiences. C# sure doesn't do it, VB certainly doesn't do it! Ultimately it comes down to a promise of conceptual cleansliness from the entirety of a language Frontend. It's a big commitment.
- chinpokomon 12y ago
  Isn't this saying that because the MSIL is generated from C#, VB.Net, F#, etc, that there can be no guarantee? As far as I know, Rust isn't compiling to a CLR, so the GC in .Net is happening at a lower level than the language, it's happening in the runtime.
  - tel 12y ago
    GC is almost certainly best handled in the RTS if you're going to expect to have one. In theory, Rust could pick MSIL as a new target and then they'd pay overhead for a GC which is not useful at all. Alternatively, due to the existence of the GC as a given in the CLR, it might be that manual memory isn't exposed (as well or as nicely) in the MSIL making the idea of targeting Rust to it kind of silly. I have no personal clue.
    - ygra 12y ago

CmonDev 12y ago

Also known as The Best Virtual Machine. It would be nice to see the 64-bit Mono vs JVM vs V8 (or whatever monkey it's called this time) in a year or so. .NET CLR was already destroying every other on Win (even before RyuJIT and SIMD and native compilation), now Linux will be covered as well.

nbevans 12y ago
You are wholly correct but even still, sadly, you can expect a barrage of down votes for stating the truth.
nercury 12y ago
I think the JavaScript virtual machines are amazing. Thanks to browser speed wars, they pulled out a trick that I would not have thought possible - making JavaScript fast as hell. Calling V8 "whatever monkey" is a bit ignorant. Oh, I haven't said that JavaScript is a good language :)
- aselzer 12y ago
  I believe the comment meant V8 and {Spider,Trace,Jäger}Monkey (the Mozilla JS engine), which nowadays even beats V8 in some benchmarks. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpiderMonkey_%28software%29#TraceMonkey http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpiderMonkey_%28software%29#Tra...
- _random_ 12y ago
  Unfortunately it pushed the industry on the wrong path. Now everyone is coming app with transpilable super-sets and some folks are even pushing the unmaintainable code to the previously safe server-side (node, meteor etc.).
  - k__ 12y ago
    Yes. Just look what Lars Bak did with JavaScript. If he would work on the CLR, things could get really awesome.

JBiserkov 12y ago

>fundamentally only simple things can be easy

Rapzid 12y ago

Very nice. I'm wondering and hoping that Microsoft will start releasing design/architecture documentation and walkthroughs. Something that's sorely lacking from most open source projects is any sort of documentation to help would-be contributors get up to speed and wrap their heads around things. On a lot of smaller projects it's not a huge deal, but some of the new dotnet foundation stuff is MASSIVE.

MichaelGG 12y ago
Yeah this is great. I'm really looking forward to detailed docs and explanations of some of the more low level and not-so-publicly understood parts. For instance, AFAICT, the whole double locking initialization question doesn't have a sold public answer. It's unsure that "myfield = new Foo()" is totally safe if the constructor throws. Obviously that'd be a huge flaw if not safe, but even top C# experts don't seem to be sure. With a fully open source CLR and docs, we should be able to figure this stuff out, rather than finding a few things of blog posts from 2004 and guessing. We could also learn why some things are the way they are. For instance, why can you lock (Monitor) on every object? The syncblock on each object can't be free, so why is this encoded into each object (or even available at all), versus dedicated sync objects (which are what gets used in practice, anyways). And maybe someone will provide much needed enhancements, like a way to effectively use the stack when safe. Or maybe some research projects will add advanced type features, which spark the way forward into the actual implementation. I'm very much looking forward to this and really hope it marks a new era beyond hassle-free use on Linux.

_random_ 12y ago

2016-s default gentlemen's choice: Azure, Win10, Docker, CoreCLR, ASP.NET Web API, F#, TypeScript.

MichaelGG 12y ago
Azure is a nice offering, pretty slick. But the costs of compute on Azure are literally 200% of Google Cloud Compute Engine. And the performance of GCE is also better. I'm very anti Google, and I had dismissed GCE out of hand. But then I looked into it and tried it out and I'm blown away. VMs launch like instantly, and are much faster than their Azure counterparts. Niceties, like SSH in the browser really are cute, too. And, each machine can have a public IP, instead of Azure's quirky "cloud service" one IP limitation. But pricing, that's what kills you. While Azure makes a big deal about how they match pricing, it's only on the storage/transfer sides. The same specs on Azure are 200% more money. The same performance is... a lot more money. I think it's cause the main tier of Azure runs on some older AMD series, but GCE is running Ivy/Sandy bridge. As a longtime Azure user, I was rather distressed to find I was paying so much more for less. Even after the discounts MS had for 6 or 12 month commits, their pricing is still far more. Also s/TypeScript/WebSharper.

std_throwaway 12y ago

I'm wondering how this relates to LLVM or JAVA bytecode.

moomin 12y ago

Just to point out that, as much as the CLR was specced as cross-language, it's damn hard to run Java on it, Python and Ruby are abandoned, no-one's even tried Haskell.

Solarsail 12y ago
Isn't this a general problem of cross-language VMs? Different languages need different object models, and different data representations. [0] At least according to one Parrot developer, the Parrot object model was one of the biggest pain points for porting JS/Ruby/Python to Parrot... Where that object model was meant to be universal, and work for any language. [1] That said, IronPython does still semi-exist [2], and I'm not sure how well JRuby handles interoperability with Java or Jython... [0] One former dev on one of the Iron* languages posted on reddit about how the CLR failed on its cross language ambitions. I can't find the post, but they gradually found it was mostly C# centric anyways, and ports of other languages were mostly incompatible and second-class [1] http://whiteknight.github.io/2015/01/15/parrottheend.html http://whiteknight.github.io/2015/01/15/parrottheend.html [2] http://ironpython.net/announcements/ http://ironpython.net/announcements/ for what it's worth...
- larsberg 12y ago
  It's a hard problem, which the COMPlus team knew when they started out. During the early pre-release period, there was a then-NDA-only project, Project 7, which gave grants to people trying to port both commercial languages like perl and academic languages like scheme. I was at Northwestern, where we got a Project 7 grant to work on a scheme implementation (under Ian Horswill, done by Pinku Surana in my group) and scheme language service (done by me). We provided a lot of feedback, but it's tough for a group of a couple of students (or in the case of Perl, one commercial dev) to keep up with the then massive-breaking-changes drops we'd get from DevDiv every 3 months or so and provide feedback when it was on stuff that was, to the developers, around 6 months old. Often, by the time feedback landed, it was "too late" to incorporate because of product cycles and got postponed. Or the stuff we'd request was a dupe of "add tail call instruction" which had been postponed long before any of us got started in Project 7. I say this as somebody who then graduated and then went to work in DevDiv for the next 7 years, where I was treated very well, so I certainly have no axes to grind on that front :-)

mmf 12y ago

Wait a second. Isn't the elefant in the room the fact that Microsoft is open sourcing a core piece of their software? And MIT license!!! What's happening?