As I get ready to leave Microsoft, I'm once again thinking about BitC. I want to get the implementation and the language definition to a point of usability, and this seems like a good time to examine some of the things that I think, in hindsight, were mistakes or might warrant re-examination. Most of these issues are mundane practical things. A few of them are deeper design choices/issues.
One of the pervading themes that is currently on my mind is interoperability. I want to bring up the compiler on either MSIL/CLR or JVM or both. My current belief is that CLR should be done first, mainly because JVM doesn't support explicit unboxing. That specific issue will be a topic of discussion, but going in *either* direction raises interop issues that need to be thought out. In the interest of keeping the discussion threads sane, I'm going to initiate them with multiple notes under separate subjects. All will begin with "BitC 0.20" in the subject line. I really want input on all of these points, but most especially on the mundane ones. :-) Since I'm not formally out of Microsoft yet, I need to emphasize that I'm not engaged in this discussion on behalf of the company, that so far as I know Microsoft has no interest in BitC one way or the other. They've been gracious in allowing me to restart this set of conversations before my last day (which is March 19th). Jonathan
_______________________________________________ bitc-dev mailing list [email protected] http://www.coyotos.org/mailman/listinfo/bitc-dev
