Feelin' the open source VB love!
I just noticed in the mono-vb mailing list that Miguel de Icaza announced that:
In the next couple of days, I will remove mbas, the Visual Basic runtime and the various other incomplete forks of mbas that we have on the mcs tree from the tree as they are outdated, no longer under development, unmaintained and buggy.
We will replace this with two new components:
- Mainsosft’s new fresh VB runtime.
This fresh VB runtime was written by Rafael Mizrahi and Boris Kirzner completely in VB. The code also contains two extensive test suites: a C# based test suite for low-level components and it consumes plenty of VB tests from the current runtime, compilers and the new vbc from Rolf Bjarne.
- Rolf’s VB compiler written in VB.
Rolf Bjarne has been working on a VB8 compiler written in VB itself, which is a very good test for the qualities of his compiler.
This compiler is very close to bootstrapping and it is also able to build these new class libraries (it can compile itself, and is missing one tiny feature: embedding resources, to be self-hosting)
Rolf effort is partially funded by Google Summer of Code program.
and in a follow up message…
I also forgot to mention, the new VB Runtime written in VB already has many 2.0 features implemented as well.
Makes me feel all tingly inside. ;-)
OK, on a more serious note, it’s awesome to see that the mono team and (cough) Google (cough) is sponsoring the VB initiative. With all of the various “new” languages floating out there supposedly trying to make development life easier, cooler, hipper, whatever; it amazes me that many of the features that these newer languages try to do already exist (yet ignored) in VB. With initiatives like this, at least there’s an opportunity for open source and alternate operating systems to share in the VB love.
As soon as one of my Mono buddies comes online in IM, I’ll have to see what he thinks of this announcement and get his feedback after it’s released.
And, one question I have, if support for VB8 is being done now… what is the status of Windows Forms 2.0 on Mono? Hmmm….
Hmmm… so maybe there is hope after all for XboxFriends on Linux and Mac. ;-)
EDIT: After contacting Miguel wondering if he really meant VB9, he responded that he meant the VB version that “ships with VS 2005”. I’ve edited his original text to reflect this.