Hello, > Forking is generally a dead-end for code sharing. That's what happened > to mbas. That's what will eventually happen to mbas2 I guess. At some > point the two versions just diverge so much that the gap just gets too > scary.
This I disagree with, because this assumes that the fork is not maintained, and also assumes that we can not refactor or share any code between gmcs and mbas2. For instance, gmcs today is a full fork of mcs, a fork that nowadays is updated on every change to mcs so that both compilers remain in parity. This fork was done because the addition of generics were consider at the time to be an unstable change (2003). In the discussion I had with Rafael, the idea would be to keep this going on. In fact, in Mono today we have a few other "forks", one of them being the JIT engine (the new IL representation) and we synchronize the changes every week or so. As for refactoring, we have done some of that work on mcs/gmcs, and the idea is to have them share source files in the future. Using a combination of refactoring and partial classes to accomplish this. The same could be done with mbas. Again, I do not know much about Boo, but generics is not a simple addition, it has taken us a very long time to get it to the point we are today, and VB could get a boost just from this (we started in early 2003). The same will apply to LINQ extensions, we will be investing in gmcs to do this, and it seems mbas2 could ride on this tail. Using Boo is probably a good idea, but I will need more technical convincing :-) Miguel _______________________________________________ Mono-vb mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ximian.com/mailman/listinfo/mono-vb
