.NET and the Unification of Languages

I was looking back at Steve Yegge's EE380 GROK talk. Steve is as usual both entertaining and provocative.

It is difficult to describe GROK, but it is a compiler toolchain at a high level. As polygot programmers, we have used different IDEs and editors for different languages, but there is no one text editor or IDE to rule-them-all -- simply because each language has its own idiocracies and what not. Grok tries to solve the toolchain parity problem:

My project is accomplishing this lofty and almost insanely ambitious goal through the (A) normative, language-neutral, cross-language definitions of, and (B) subsequent standardization of, several distinct parts of the toolchain: (I) compiler and interpreter Intermediate Representations and metadata, (II) editor-client-to-server protocols, (III) source code indexing, analysis and query languages, and (IV) fine-grained dependency specifications at the level of build systems, source files, and code symbols.

-- Steve Yegge, Notes from the Mystery Machine Bus

It is interesting to note that in the Microsoft .NET world, the toolchain problem is less pervasive. In .NET, all languages share a common library (.NET framework), compile to one CIL (common intermediate language) standard, runs on a single CLR (common language runtime), and development is driven by a single Visual Studio IDE. This unification of languages resulting in a standard toolchain showcases the beauty of .NET.

In other news, the .NET foundation open sources significant part of the .NET platform, including the .NET compiler platform (Roslyn). (However, language differences are still tricky -- Roslyn provides two distinct compiler APIs for C# and VB.) Microsoft also released CTP3 (Community Technical Preview) of RyuJIT (a .NET JIT compiler).