Microsoft's Roslyn: Reinventing the Compiler as we Know it
Linked by twitterfire on Mon 24th Oct 2011 22:52 UTC
General Development "Looking past the Metro hype, the Build conference also revealed promising road maps for C#, Visual Studio, and the .Net platform as a whole. Perhaps the most exciting demo of the conference for .Net developers, however, was Project Roslyn, a new technology that Microsoft made available yesterday as a Community Technology Preview. Roslyn aims to bring powerful new features to C#, Visual Basic, and Visual Studio, but it's really much more than that. If it succeeds, it will reinvent how we view compilers and compiled languages altogether."
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Nelson
Member since:
2005-11-29

Roslyn is so much more. You can hook into _every_ step of the compiler.

I've already seen pretty powerful stuff done with Roslyn the few days its been out. Things like adding custom extensions to the C# language (which are transformed at the syntax level, very cool).

There is just so much potential here its hardly conceivable the cool things you can do now.

No, this isn't anything thats ever been done before.

Reply Parent Score: 4

permafrosty Member since:
2011-10-25

Things like adding custom extensions to the C# language (which are transformed at the syntax level, very cool).


You mean like Lisp macros?

Reply Parent Score: 2

Nelson Member since:
2005-11-29

Sure, Lispmacros can do that. That's about it though.

I don't understand with the obsession people have with undermining whats been done here. You guys try so hard to find something, anything, to knock this project on, because it can't possibly be that Microsoft innovates on anything.

Other platforms offer one aspect, or a few aspects of Roslyn. None of them does them all in as a cohesive language as this. Especially not for a statically typed language.

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JAlexoid Member since:
2009-05-19

Agreed, in C#/.NET it hasn't been done before. Or maybe it has?
But outside .NET world it's not something new.

PS: Did you know that GCC stands for GNU Compiler Collection?

Edited 2011-10-25 11:18 UTC

Reply Parent Score: 2

Nelson Member since:
2005-11-29

I guarantee you GCC can do nothing even close to this. Maybe LLVM+Clang (both of them, neither independently) can come close, but the richness of the APIs are not comparable.

Roslyn is alot more fleshed out than any other Compiler as a Service.

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moondevil Member since:
2005-07-08

Roslyn is so much more. You can hook into _every_ step of the compiler.


Like Lisp Macros, Smalltak image changes, Groovy AST, and so forth?


Just because Microsoft PR makes it sound new, it does not mean it is.

Reply Parent Score: 4

Nelson Member since:
2005-11-29

No. Each of those only deal with one aspect of Roslyn. None of them do it all. Especially not lisp, come on dude.

Download the CTP, take it for a spin.

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FunkyELF Member since:
2006-07-26

Roslyn is so much more. You can hook into _every_ step of the compiler.


Great... now we can have compile time monkey patching so projects will be even more locked to Microsoft. I don't want it.

Reply Parent Score: 1