OT; Will MS kill .NET ?

[Nick Sabalausky]

On Tue, 20 Aug 2013 18:34:24 +0200
"Luís Marques" <luis at luismarques.eu> wrote:

> On Tuesday, 20 August 2013 at 13:37:00 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:
> > Native code has nothing to do with systems programming or the 
> > mapping of one-to-one from language to microprocessor 
> > instructions.
> 
> At least in the context of "fully native" and C#, which we were 
> discussing, I disagree. See below.
> 
> > Before the Java and .NET craziness, VM everywhere, all 
> > mainstream compilers generated native code.
> >
> > Had Sun and Microsoft decided to generate native code instead 
> > of their current solution, we wouldn't even be discussing this.
> 
> If I understand your point, you are defining (fully?) native as 
> simply generating CPU opcodes and executing those directly. But I 
> think this definition can be unhelpful, because there is an 
> equivalence and a continuum between code and data. For instance:
> 

I think what the discussion here (both sides) ultimately amounts to is
this:

Some "native" languages (ie, generates CPU opcodes) have strong support
for low-level control (C/C++/D), and other native languages have
weaker support for low-level control (a native compiler for C#/Java).
Languages designed to run on a VM like JVM/.NET (but not VMs like
LLVM IM, VirtualBox or "macro-assembly" opcodes) tend to have inherently
weaker support for low-level control due to the VM. Such languages will
likely continue having weaker low-level ability even when using true
native compilation.