Re: Microsoft Intermediate Language?

"Mike Dimmick" <mike@dimmick.demon.co.uk> writes:


>"David Griffiths" <dave@prim.demon.co.uk> wrote in message
>> Hi, does anyone know where there is a definition of Microsoft's
>> Intermediate Language (MSIL)? Does anyone have any views as to it's
>> suitability as a general purpose compiler intermediate language?
>
>Given it hasn't been released yet, who knows?


Well, I don't think the 1.0 release is likely to be *that* different
to the beta 1 release. A draft of the specs have been released, and a
beta release of the tools is publically available, so I think those
who are really interested have enough information to make a reasonable
initial judgement.


>I _do_ know that it was designed to support C, C++, C#, Visual Basic, Cobol,
>Perl, Fortran and many other languages (Eiffel, Microsoft Research are
>producing a version of Standard ML).


AFAIK there is no Fortran implementation for .NET yet.


Support for multiple languages was a design goal, but I don't think
it was specifically designed to support Fortran, Eiffel, or Perl.


>Therefore I would anticipate that it
>is a lower level IL than Java bytecode, which is fairly closely tied to the
>Java programming language.


MS IL supports some additional constructs (e.g. pass-by-reference,
objects allocated on the stack, and tail calls), so it is less tied to
any specific language, but the IL is at a very similar level to Java
bytecode, IMHO.


>A friend of mine has Beta 1 installed at home; I can't do this because I
>need a reliable development platform for my final year undergraduate
>project.


If you need a reliable development platform, I suggest Linux.
Beta 1 of the .NET SDK works fine running in a VMWare virtual
environment under Linux, BTW ;-)


--
Fergus Henderson <fjh@cs.mu.oz.au> | "I have always known that the pursuit
                                                                        | of excellence is a lethal habit"
WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh> | -- the last words of T. S. Garp.

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