General praise, CLR and C# bindings

[Ctaesis]

First off, I'd like to say how impressed I am with the documentation for Ice. Great job.

Second, I did notice a lack of discussion of facets in the documentation, and a proliferation of XREF tags.

Ok, now to the substance of this post..

From what I understand, a C# binding for ICE is coming out in Feburary or so. Now, C# is a language built on the Common Language Runtime, but so is VB.NET, Managed Extenstions for C++, etc.

My question is, to what degree have you leveraged the language-independence provided by the CLR in your C# binding such that it makes bindings to other .NET languages (more or less) trivial?

I read a post from Michi that said that he could have just wrapped the C++ runtime, but he wanted to do a native C# implementation. However since C# implements the CLR it seems to be a bit over the top to also then do native MC++, VB.NET, etc.NET implementations when a significant portion of the IL for those implementations are likely to be identical.

In any event, I'm excited that you choose C# first because VB.NET disturbs me PERIOD END SENTENCE

[michi]

Originally posted by Ctaesis

My question is, to what degree have you leveraged the language-independence provided by the CLR in your C# binding such that it makes bindings to other .NET languages (more or less) trivial?

I read a post from Michi that said that he could have just wrapped the C++ runtime, but he wanted to do a native C# implementation. However since C# implements the CLR it seems to be a bit over the top to also then do native MC++, VB.NET, etc.NET implementations when a significant portion of the IL for those implementations are likely to be identical.

If, after C#, we were to do a VB or MC++ version of Ice, I expect we would do those as a language mapping on top of the Ice assembly that is implemented in C#. We'll have to wait and see how this pans out. Ice development is largely driven by customer demand (and the limited number of hours per working day :-)

Cheers,

Michi.

[Ctaesis]

Sounds good to me.