Microsoft Project: Verona

[Paulo Pinto]

On Sunday, 8 December 2019 at 10:36:50 UTC, IGotD- wrote:
> On Saturday, 7 December 2019 at 14:53:41 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:
>>
>> They have done more than just trying, Rust now ships in 
>> Microsoft products (Azure IoT and VScode) and they are part of 
>> the companies meeting the Rust core team regarding how to 
>> foster adoption among enterprises.
>>
>> https://gist.github.com/rylev/0e3c3895dcb40b6a1c1cf8c427c01b5e
>
> I wonder why Microsoft never tinkered with D for this purpose. 
> Was it the garbage collector that made them avoid D after all 
> these years? However Rust comes along and Microsoft is suddenly 
> interested.
>
> I'm interested what Microsoft does with Verona. In general 
> Microsoft are good at creating more ergonomic languages. Rust 
> is sometimes a bit clunky to use at some points and the 
> question if Microsoft can make a more user friendly language 
> than Rust.

I imagine that was indeed the case, if you look between the lines 
from Joe Duffy's presentations on Midori.

https://www.infoq.com/presentations/csharp-systems-programming/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVm938gMWl0

At the end of his Rust keynote, he mentions that even after being 
showed how well it worked, Windows Dev team was quite sceptical 
of it.

However as per 
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/singularity/ , 
Midori used to power the natural language search service for the 
West Coast and Asia. Which I imagine was a way to stress test it.

Additionally, now with WinUI ongoing efforts they decided to 
convert several of the .NET Native components into C++. Although 
this doesn't matter that much, because at the end of the day they 
are all based on COM, it appears (from some BUILD talks) that it 
is the way to convince shops still using MFC/ATL to eventually 
move into WinUI.

So in spite of all the security issues regarding C and C++, they 
keep on using them, although more constrained (Azure Sphere, C++ 
Core Guidelines, lifetime static analysis), because there is a 
large set of their customers that won't do .NET no matter what.

Also note that since C# 7, .NET incorporated many of Midori 
lessons, and now many additional scenarios for low level coding 
are covered, almost at the same level as D.

Still for some, GC has the same effect as garlic for vampires, 
and hence Rust and now Verona.