Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 1st May 2012 21:59 UTC
Wow. "One crazy idea that the team had at that dinner was to translate Android's source code to C#. Android would benefit from C# performance features like structures, P/Invoke, real generics and our more mature runtime. [...] We decided it was crazy enough to try. So we started a small skunkworks project with the goal of doing a machine translation of Android from Java to C#. We called this project XobotOS." Most of Android's layouts and controls are now in C#. The small benchmark is stunning, but as much as I admire the work, I'm wondering that this like going from bad to worse - from Oracle's Java to Microsoft's C#.
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Member since:2009-03-17
Member since:2009-07-18
If that's a Microsoft marketing rep, he'll have an easy time. From language features to the libraries, C# has been much nicer than Java for years. It's easy to see how someone could think that Sun/Oracle sat around doing some butt picking and waiting for open source frameworks to fill in the gaping holes in the platform while (poorly) implementing some language features in not quite as nice ways as C# had already done.
I'm not developing on either at the moment, so take that as an un-beholden opinion. No... fact. Take it as a fact. 
Member since:2011-08-13
Member since:2009-06-30
Member since:
2012-05-01
I'm very surprised to hear this statement:
The small benchmark is stunning, but as much as I admire the work, I'm wondering that this like going from bad to worse - from Oracle's Java to Microsoft's C#.
First of all, technically speaking, C# is leagues better than Java in many respects, both as a language and an implementation. Some things, like value types, have been strengths of C# since day one. Other things, like generics and lambdas, have been implemented and extended, while Java simply rested on its laurels.
Second, I don't think Microsoft has shown anywhere near as much bad faith towards the developer community as Oracle. Microsoft has submitted every version of C# to ECMA for standardization. There are multiple free (as in speech) C# compilers and runtime implementations, and unlike Oracle (which is actively suing Google), Microsoft has explicitly promised *not* to sue. And even if they did sue, they would have no case against a compiler which strictly implemented the ECMA spec.
So I'm not sure what you're worried about.