Win32 Open Source or free .NET integration?

[David Bolen]

Michael Kelly <mkelly2002 at adelphia.net> writes:

> I haven't used .NET myself yet but another programmer
> using it raves about the back end integration among
> the languages.  Also I noticed ActiveState is doing
> a Visual Python that's supposed to integrate fully
> into .NET.

That actually seems reasonably unlikely at this point.  The "Visual
Python" project at ActiveState is to tie into Visual Studio for .NET
(e.g., the IDE) and not tying Python itself into the CLR (Common
Language Runtime) of .NET.

There was a Python.NET project (more of an investigation really) also
back a while at ActiveState - they may still have Mark Hammond's white
paper available on their site.  It achieved some interoperability, but
was a decent amoutn away from a full integration into .NET and some of
the results of the experimentation were not that promising in terms of
performance or good fit of the CLR versus some of Python's dynamic
model.

>             I know there are some open source project
> for .NET for Linux/unix but I was wondering if anyone
> has heard of a free Win32 implementation in the works?

Depends on what you mean by "Win32 implementation", or just what an
"open source project for .NET" is meant to mean?  The term .NET is
wroth with over-use and ambiguity (probably the way Microsoft likes
it).

If you mean the fundamentals - the .NET framework (the CLR along with
the command line C# compiler and associated documentation) is freely
available from Microsoft to download for Windows.  That's roughly
equivalent to what they are providing as the ECMA:

    http://msdn.microsoft.com/netframework/prodinfo/getdotnet.asp

--
-- David
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