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Can we please have .NET, C++ and Windows on the same unit to avoid the usual issues among them (e.g. Longhorn)?



I don't remember the Longhorn problems being due to any friction between the developer division and the Windows org.

Rather, mostly Microsoft bit off more than it could chew, and somewhat the perf of .NET on the average machine of the day wasn't up to snuff. If I recall correctly, there were also issues with managed-native interop that really threw a wrench into the works when developing the new (.NET-based) shell.

EDIT: There could also have been issues due to the antitrust consent decree - but that's speculation - I don't remember the details of the decree. If that is the case, then parent comment could be correct.


Many of those performance issues were political and not technical.

Hence why the going native when the windows team won the redesign to Vista.

Everything that the .NET team has been doing in the last years in terms of compiling directly to native code via MDIL to Windows Phone 8 and now .NET Native, it is a consequence of that.

The ideas behind Longhorn could have been achieved if .NET followed the same compilation model as Ada, Delphi, Modula-2, Modula-3, Oberon or any other memory safe language with compilation straight to native code.

This is how I see it by reading between the lines from all those MSDN articles, Channel 9 videos and occasional forum posts.

I might be wrong, but that is how I see it.


(Interestingly, Oberon was mentioned in the comments on the Web Asm submission today: "Oberon language had a similar system called Juice back in 1997. It does exactly the same thing, e.g. using binary format to store a compressed abstract syntax tree as intermediate format which can be compiled efficiently and quickly. I think it even has a browser plugin much as Java applet..." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9733520 )


I was fortunate to be able to use Oberon in its golden days.

Just like any compiled language there were multiple implementations of the Oberon language.

But Oberon was actually a systems programming language with GC, used to implement the Oberon workstation OS, which was used at ETHZ IT department.

Fully complete OS, Xerox PARC style, as Wirth was inspired by the Cedar workstation on his second visit there (the first one lead to Lillith and Modula-2).

At least here in Europe, some universities had some versions of those systems.

Besides that implementation, there were other ones based on bytecode and JIT compilation on module load, for example.


Very cool. Do you know of any particularly good (English) sources to learn more about the OS, that you could recommend?

I've always been curious about Lisp machines... Was the Oberon OS composed of Oberon code from the lowest to the highest levels?


Yes, you can start with the 2013 review of the "Project Oberon" book, that Niklaus Wirth made by Oberon's anniversary.

http://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/ProjectOberon/

It includes the source code.

The original edition and many other books are available from his site at the university.

http://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/

Some screenshots and information from the old days:

http://www.ethoberon.ethz.ch/native/WebScreen.html

http://www.ethoberon.ethz.ch/native/

Oberon was followed by Oberon-2, which you can find here:

http://www.ssw.uni-linz.ac.at/Research/Papers/Oberon2.pdf

http://ssw.jku.at/Research/Books/Oberon2.pdf

Which then gave birth to Active Oberon:

http://www.ocp.inf.ethz.ch/wiki/Documentation/Front

There was also the EthOS as Oberon evolution.

http://e-collection.library.ethz.ch/view/eth:38713

The Oberon operating system was fully implemented in Oberon, with some assembly for the kernel module and boot loader. In the later versions, the SYSTEM package gained all required intrisics to do everything in pure Oberon.

It is a bit confusing to speak about OS and language, because like Java, the same name is used for both.

Eventually they moved on to other stuff.

There was an Oberon evolution for .NET called Zonnon, but it is hardly known.

One of the guys working on Oberon as a student was Robert Griesemer, a Go designer. Hanspeter Mössenböck from Oberon-2 is one of the researchers working on Graal.

Oberon is related to Mesa/Cedar, not Lisp Machines. Basically something like a .NET/Java OS in the late 70's providing the same expressiveness of the Lisp and Smalltalk environments but in a strong typed language, capable of systems programming.

Although they followed the same principle as Lisp machines. On the papers they refer to Assembly as bytecode, because the CPUs were CISC with microcode for execution.

https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_xeroxparcteCedarProgra...

https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_xeroxparcteriencesCrea...

https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_xeroxparctddingGarbage...

So while AT&T was making UNIX, Xerox PARC had Interlisp-D, Smalltalk and Mesa/Cedar.


So the main reason Longhorn didn't come to fruition was performance? (Honest question, no sarcasm implied).


The main reason is that Microsoft wasn't on track to ship the OS with its grand vision (the "Pillars of Longhorn," which included e.g. WinFS) in any reasonable amount of time.

For example, it wasn't the case that Longhorn was code complete and the Powers that Be said, "You know, the perf isn't where we'd like it, so time to reset." Or that the only work that was happening was perf work.

There were just too many parts to the grand vision of Longhorn, and hence too many moving pieces, and it just never solidified.

IIRC, around the time of the reset, bugs were being opened at a faster rate than they were being closed. So not only was Longhorn not going to be ship-ready in any reasonable amount of time, at that rate it was never going to be ship-ready at all.


At PDC 2003, they also stated they were expecting much faster processors - one slide mentioned 6GHz chips.


Really interesting.

Mid-2003 is when I started at Microsoft. Though: out in MSN, not where the action was. :)

Has Moore's Law really broken down that severely 'lately'? I'm reminded of one of Kurzweil's books that shows 'Moore's Law' holding since before digital computers. But - the book shows - zoomed in, the trend line is actually a succession of periods of fairly rapid growth followed by stagnation. (Obviously though one question is how cherry-picked the underlying data was...)

Edit: The book was The Singularity is Near.


Transistors have kept getting cheaper, but single core perf hasn't been growing as fast for the last decade or so.


I guess one of them was.

But as I said, it was most certainly political as well.

Anyone that went through such big rewrites at corporations similar to Microsoft, knows how much appeasing to different units has more value than technical merits.

Anyway that is just my opinion. For the real issues we would need insider info.




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