MSBUILD 2014, C# gets an ahead of time compiler to native code.

[Adam Wilson]

On Wed, 02 Apr 2014 13:36:56 -0700, Orvid King <blah38621 at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, 02 Apr 2014 15:24:00 -0500, Paulo Pinto <pjmlp at progtools.org>  
> wrote:
>
>> So it finally happened, C# gets an AOT compiler in addition to NGEN/JIT
>> as part of standard Visual Studio tools.
>>
>> http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/02/microsoft-updates-visual-studio-with-support-for-universal-projects-typescript-1-0-and-net-native-code-compilation/
>>
>> More information will be provided in the native sessions tomorrow and on
>> Friday.
>>
>> Posting this as it has direct implications into D's adoption.
>>
>> --
>> Paulo
>>
>
> NGen's been around since .net 2.0, all the native compilation is that  
> they are talking about is just a few stubs and a nice pretty interface  
> for developers to work with. They do not currently intend to support the  
> AOT compilation for desktops, not in the way that D does at least.  
> Microsoft's AOT interface will also only ever support Windows. If Apple  
> is very lucky, they might support it on OSX, but it will never make it  
> to Linux. All in all, this news is basically no news :P It's also been  
> possible to AOT compile a .net program with mono on linux and deploy it  
> with no dependencies for quite a while now.

Incorrect. It is a fully AOT compiler using the Visual C++ backend. NGen  
assemblies are incredibly fragile and machine specific, by using the VC++  
backend they have eliminated that problem. It's not the Native C# language  
that has been talked about, but it is definitely a step in the right  
direction.

-- 
Adam Wilson
GitHub/IRC: LightBender
Aurora Project Coordinator