A gentle critque..

[Walter Bright]

Ben Cooley wrote:
> If you would like to see how such a convergence would work, take a look at
> "managed C++".  With .NET, microsoft faced the same problem.  How do you get
> people to migrate to .NET when they have large quantities of code written in C
> and C++?  Microsofts answer was the "IJW" philosophy.  You can take any C/C++
> code and simply compile it in .NET, then add .NET specific constructs to make
> the C++ code play nice in the .NET world.  You do not need to recode your
> existing C++ libraries in C#.  This is not really an apples to apples
> comparison, because Microsoft didn't extend C# to parse C or Cpp headers (which
> it should have in my opinion), but it did make Cpp play nice with .NET and that
> was very important for the adoption of .NET.

What managed C++ is is a bunch of extensions added to Microsoft's 
existing C++ compiler. That's what enables it to compile C++ - it 
already is a C++ compiler.

What they didn't do is make C++ code accessible to C#. They made C# code 
accessible from C++. That's good for enticing people to migrate to .net, 
but does nothing to migrate them to C#.