quote:Original post by TheMuuj
I know it hasn''t been out long, but has anyone here tried Rotor yet? I''m tempted to download FreeBSD and give it a whirl.
I have built it successfully under both XP and FreeBSD. Not done much with it though, except running "Hello world" and looking at the source. XP is preferrable, since you are able to do some debugging against it using the VS.NET debugger.
quote:
Also, can the Windows XP Rotor run side-by-side with Microsoft''s .NET Framework?
Yes.
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If so, how do you switch between them? I know different versions of the CLR are supposed to be able to run simultanously, but I''m not sure how well this actually works.
To compile, you just give a full path to the Rotor csc.exe(or put it first in %PATH%). Runtime-wise, it has a private GAC that doesnt interfere with the Framework GAC.
You will need to use a program called
clix.exe to run programs under Rotor instead of the Framework runtime. Of course, assemblies created with Rotor will also run under the Framework runtime(and vice versa, as long as you dont use classes not included in Rotor).quote:
And if someone were to port the JIT-compiler of Rotor to PowerPC, would it work on MacOSX with minimal changes?
There have been a couple of threads on this on the Rotor mailinglist[1]. This statement from John Norwood[MS] sums it up:
This isn''t going to be feasible because the current Rotor implementation is
Intel x86-only. The common denominator of FreeBSD isn''t going to help out
much here.
There would be a lot of work in numerous areas of the Rotor CLI and PAL
implementations to get it to build and run on the PowerPC chip. The endian
work alone is substantial and there are also issues of variations in the
developer toolset (gcc, etc.) between implementations of FreeBSD.
quote:speed_bump
Mono and Rotor are unrelated. In fact, the Mono folks advise anyone who wants to contribute to Mono to not look at the Rotor source.
Didnt I just post that?
[1]news://microsoft.public.shared_source.cli
. Honestly, there''s little reason to upgrade unless you''re going to be doing .NET development. Do you want a more standards compliant compiler? There are free ones available. Do you want a more optimizing compiler? The Intel C/C++ compiler, while not free, can do some incredible things. Do you want a better IDE? Well, it seems than only about half of the people that see it actually think the IDE''s better. Then there''s money, I like money 
. But, again, if you''re doing .NET-anything, there''s suddenly a reason. So, I see it as a pretty clear distinction between the groups who do upgrade and those who don''t. I don''t know why this thread has grown so much, we''re each different, isn''t that enough to explain why we do or don''t upgrade? Of course, more pointless threads have been seen before 
