Matt Campbell wrote: [...] > Of course, the DLR's biggest current advantage is the number of popular > languages already targeting it.
The biggest advantage of the DLR is that it's MS. That's also its greatest disadvantage. :) It's an easy sell to corporate IT, you'll be able to find tons of resources (books, training, developers), etc. MS certainly has marketing and development muscle to throw behind SilverLight and the DLR. Jim Hugunin and John Lam are very capable developers. The problem for me is that MS has a way of solving 80-90% of the problem elegantly but leaving the last bit horribly convoluted, overcomplicated and/or inflexible. IMO, this is what happens when you have a closed source development model and employ a lot of developers with varying skill levels to work on the framework. [...] > I'd think the DLR would be quite appealing to a > developer wanting to add a scripting interface or a plugin system to a > desktop app on Windows, even if said app isn't currently using the CLR. Windows Scripting has been around for a long time. It enabled developers to support VBScript and JScript in their applications. The DLR represents something a lot nicer, but the idea/capability has been around for a while via COM. [...] > the DLR could also potentially run on Mono, > if that's not being done already. http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2007/Jun-21.html I think this is the beginnings of a 1.0 implementation however, not the DLR bit. > So I suppose that the DLR's chief drawback is the size of the CLR or > Mono; even the CoreCLR included with Silverlight 1.1 Alpha is about 5 MB > (including the standard library). And 1.1 is the release most .NET developers are excited about. But its ship date could be in 2008 (and I believe that's without linux support). > Of course, if a time comes when the > vast majority of desktop computers have a reasonably recent CLR > installed, as Microsoft surely hopes will happen, then footprint will be > much less of a consideration. But that's a big "if", probably > contingent on mass adoption of Windows Vista. The first windows OS the main .NET CLR shipped with was Vista. I doubt they'll ship the DLR with Vista. The way they'll get Silverlight out is via windows update. > So what advantages does Neko have over the DLR that I've overlooked? > This might be good material for the FAQ. In addition to what Nicolas mentioned, IMO: 1) available today. 2) runs on Linux, MacOSX and Windows today. 3) offers a server side solution with mod_neko. (SilverLight seems focused on the client, although I'm certain the DLR will run on IIS/ASP.NET) -Brian -- Neko : One VM to run them all (http://nekovm.org)
