
Microsoft Open Sources C# Compiler - keithwarren
http://roslyn.codeplex.com/
======
keithwarren
They also announced as part of this that they are putting a large swatch of
their .NET Source code under Apache 2 and accepting pull requests.

Folks, this is a very big deal for Microsoft. Who would have imagined this 10
years ago?

Here is an image that shows what they are putting into the community
[https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BkT9oBcCQAAHIAV.jpg:large](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BkT9oBcCQAAHIAV.jpg:large)

~~~
baldfat
Once again the whole KILL MONO FUD was the actions of the Open Source
Community in the last 5 years. I never understood how in the world they got
this is a trap from everything that was happening.

I don't agree with RMS many times but in this one way he was 100% wrong when
he targeted mono.

~~~
bambam12897
You honestly don't get it?

I really like microsoft products and I use them every day, however the
business model is too lock people in to their ecosystem so that you have to
purchase licenses for their products.

Mono clearly undermines that b/c it allows you to "easily" jump ship to a free
platform.

Unless I'm somehow completely misunderstanding their business model - killing
Mono just makes business sense.

~~~
shanselman
No, not really. It's clear to me we are moving to a devices and services
model. More people writing C# means a broad reach on everything from netduinos
to iphones to desktops to the cloud.

* I work for MSFT, on the Cloud.

~~~
avenger123
Any way we can get some clear story on Mono or where the direction is going?
Maybe this has already happened as part of this Build event.

~~~
shanselman
Ask Miguel, but it would make sense technically if they adopted Roslyn as a
compiler.

------
Locke1689
Everyone on Roslyn is really excited about this and we hope that it serves as
a signal that big things are happening in .NET to make the entire platform
more open and agile!

P.S. We're the Visual Basic compiler too :)

~~~
giulianob
What's the likelihood the .NET VM is open sourced as well? I use Mono right
now to run my apps on Linux but it would be great to use the official
implementation since Mono has subtle differences.

~~~
sixbrx
That's the main thing I would be interested in also, but I'm thinking that's
one thing that we WILL NOT see. That could seriously undercut the need to buy
Windows servers.

~~~
SneakerXZ
The .NET VM would be pretty much useless on other platforms. It is tied to
Windows and it would be pretty hard to rewrite. But standard libraries would
be different story.

~~~
sixbrx
I think it would be a long way from useless.

The garbage collector for example would be very interesting to peruse. Sure
threading and synchronization code would be differ but these have been
emulated on Linux before to good effect, I don't see any serious barriers
there.

------
Pxtl
As a C# developer who genuinely _likes_ the C# language (although I loathe
vast swaths of the .NET framework libs) I'm actually super-excited about this.

C# is a great language, and I hope to see it flourish outside of the MS walled
garden. Miguel de Icaza does what he can with Mono, but it can be so much
more.

~~~
TheLoneWolfling
Agreed.

I really like C#. But it's currently pretty close to useless anywhere other
than Windows - Mono doesn't even come close.

Hopefully this will close the gap.

~~~
giulianob
Depending on what you are doing, Mono has come very far. The new GC is in and
a lot of optimizations have been made. Ubuntu 14 will ship with 3.2.8 I
believe which has all the goodies. Apparently the performance is still poor
for web development but it works well for daemons/desktop apps. You're
probably better starting off with a tech that is cross platform out of the box
instead of relying on Mono but if you have an existing C# project then Mono is
awesome.

------
fournm
I'm not sure who this new company is going by the name of Microsoft, but I'm
glad they seem to be running things now.

~~~
KeyBoardG
Yea, it stood out to me that they demo'd Windows Phone first and that Nadella
gave his talk in a t-shirt and jeans.

------
sergiotapia
Microsoft, you're seducing me again. I cheated on you with Ruby and Rails
development a couple of years ago, but you're making me consider coming back
in full swing.

Competition is great for everybody and Microsoft is making all the right
moves!

~~~
Xdes
If you like Sinatra then check out Nancy.

~~~
platz
For a compiled platform, nancy seems pretty slow
[http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/](http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/)

~~~
Moto7451
[http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r8&hw=i7...](http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r8&hw=i7&test=json&s=1&l=2)

But not much behind ASP.net.

[http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r8&hw=i7...](http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r8&hw=i7&test=json&l=35u&f=zijzsv-
yelngf-yykq67)

And quite a bit ahead of Sinatra

[http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r8&hw=i7...](http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r8&hw=i7&test=json&l=sg2&f=zijzsv-
vz77cv-yykq65)

Then again, so's Perl. The joys of implementation differences.

I find Nancy a lot easier to develop with than ASP.net. You do pay for the
expressiveness however.

At work I'm deploying a Nancy based project to parse/process documents into
structured data using a 3rd party vendor's SOAP service. There were some
unpleasant compatibility issues with the SOAP service and our Perl server's
SOAP client and zero logging so I took the service's source code (so glad the
Vendor provided it) and replaced the WebService portion of it with a thin
Nancy controller to route the calls and return JSON. Since most of the
processing time is spent chewing on the files Nancy's overhead isn't an issue
and Nancy made it dead simple to code.

~~~
platz
Nice to hear from someone using it for a real project and use case. I might
consider it next time I get a chance!

------
McGlockenshire
Released under the Apache 2 license.

[http://roslyn.codeplex.com/SourceControl/latest#License.txt](http://roslyn.codeplex.com/SourceControl/latest#License.txt)

~~~
belorn
Which is really good. It put a final say in the question about patents.

~~~
e12e
Not to mention it's GPL (and BSD) compatible, which makes it so much more
useful than the various Corporate Public Licences that have been wrapped
around similar projects in the past (Sun/Oracle and MS).

------
ChuckMcM
This is great. There is a really interesting lesson/insight here. Programmers
are expensive.

There are a number of things people are doing, based on Linux, which are
basically using Linux as an OS and then layering on some custom drivers or
such into a product. Whether its a web 2.0 company using it as the server OS
or an embedded signage company. All of these were "impossible" when you had to
have your own OS team to support them, and Microsoft benefited from that. Now
the OS "maintains itself" (such as it is) and so businesses get everything
they got from employing Microsoft tools but at a much lower effective cost.
They don't need to pay big license fees, they don't need to hire programmers
to maintain a lot of code that isn't central to their product, and they don't
have to spend a lot of money/time training people on their own infrastructure.
That is a pretty big change.

Its nice to see folks realize it isn't the software that is valuable, its the
expertise to use it that has value. By open sourcing the C# compiler Microsoft
greatly increases the number of people who will develop expertise in using it
and that will most likely result in an increase of use.

------
stcredzero
If Microsoft starts working on its own Unity-clone, with a functional
language, advanced concurrency features, and good incremental GC, they could
be sure to capture a big chunk of the mindshare of game developers. This could
then be parlayed into mindshare of soft-realtime development, which will
become ever more important.

~~~
pjc50
They _had_ something similar in XNA, but unaccountably abandoned it.

~~~
AUmrysh
XNA was quite far from what Unity is. Unity gives you a full engine, whereas
XNA was a framework and you had to build the engine yourself. It was a great
little library, but it was painful for unskilled software developers (myself
at the time) to use it compared to Unity's WYSIWYG and property lists you
could modify, not to mention all of the things that came with Unity that you'd
have to build custom in XNA.

That's not to say Unity is better, it was just easier to use.

------
dangero
Wow these contributions are a huge deal for Mono. I've spent the last few
months making sure C# code works well in Mono and there are a lot of things
that are missing or buggy. WebClient for example on Mono is missing DNS
refresh timeout which means your app will never update a dns cache entry. If
the ip of a server changes, you're pretty much screwed in Mono.

~~~
SneakerXZ
This doesn't solve your issue with WebClient. This is only a compiler and not
runtime.

~~~
gebe
WebClient is mentioned on here
[http://www.dotnetfoundation.org/](http://www.dotnetfoundation.org/). It's not
just the compiler.

------
ak217
Nice. For some reason I can't clone the repo, though.

    
    
        Cloning into 'roslyn'...
        remote: Counting objects: 10525, done.
        remote: Compressing objects: 100% (4382/4382), done.
        remote: Total 10525 (delta 6180), reused 10391 (delta 6091)
        Receiving objects: 100% (10525/10525), 16.94 MiB | 1.69 MiB/s, done.
        error: RPC failed; result=56, HTTP code = 200
    

Edit: This looks like an incompatibility between GnuTLS and whatever Microsoft
is using for TLS. Using git+libcurl linked against OpenSSL works fine.

------
iamthepieman
For the first time in a long time I'm excited to be developing with Microsoft
technologies.

------
tdicola
What kind of patents do they have on the compiler tech, and is there any
guarantee they won't go after you for using it?

edit: Ah nice, Apache 2 license explicitly calls out a patent license is
granted for use. I wonder how much cajoling it took to get the lawyers to
agree to that!

------
acqq
Note that the C# compiler being open-sourced now is _not the one used in
Visual Studio._ The open sourced one is called currently the "Roslyn C#
compiler."

See Locke1689's comments here, especially:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7524722](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7524722)

"the native C# compiler (that's what we call the old C# compiler that
everyone's using in VS right now)"

~~~
breischl
That's true, they open sourced the new-hotness compiler that they're moving
to. The Roslyn compiler is still in preview, hence it hasn't had time to make
it into Visual Studio. But I believe it'll be in the next version.

Really, this seems better than opening up the old compiler that they're moving
away from.

~~~
damian2000
Yeah, agreed - I heard a Roslyn dev saying exactly that in a podcast a couple
of months back ...
[http://dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=935](http://dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=935)

------
csulmone
Wow, this is impressive. Does this mean the .Net framework is next?

~~~
tommis
They've released it under "MICROSOFT REFERENCE SOURCE LICENSE (MS-RSL)" some
time ago, but I'm not sure what the future plan is.

You can view and download the whole .NET source here:
[http://referencesource.microsoft.com/](http://referencesource.microsoft.com/)

~~~
csulmone
That is awesome. What about the CLR VM?

~~~
ptx
If they just give you the cheese, the trap doesn't work.

------
noelherrick
I wonder if Mono will use this to replace their compiler and just focus on the
runtime / VM. They'd be more focused on making it performant, vs. trying to
keep up with the latest C# features. They'd have to keep up with .NET, of
course, but I'd guess that not having to worry about a C# compiler would be
quite the load off their shoulders.

------
euske
It's interesting that they made their own lexer/parser for this (cf.
Microsoft.CodeAnalysis.CSharp/Parser/LanguageParser.cs). It seems that it has
a lot of advanced technologies (e.g. error recovery) here. I'm curious if it's
possible to create a more general parser framework out of this.

------
imarihantnahata
May be in the next few years, Microsoft will be one of the biggest players in
OpenSource :)

------
mixmastamyk
Wow, this feels like the end of Return of the Jedi where Darth takes off his
helmet, having realized he was on the wrong side.

Is this the return of the original MS?

------
revelation
Really confused about the Xamarin/MSFT situation. I see Miguel everywhere on
Build, and other MS teams casually mentioning cooperations with Xamarin.

Certainly Microsoft wouldn't mind just throwing some millions at them and
buying them outright, so are we to deduce that any such offer was rejected?

~~~
coldtea
Or we are to dedude that Microsoft didn't want to make such an offer, because
while they want to spread .NET into a cross-platform standard, they still
prefer a third party like Xamarin to deal with iOS, Linux and the like support
for .NET (perhaps for public perception reasons).

~~~
mpyne
I think public perception is actually a big thing, though on the other hand
the people most worried about that I think have already written off Mono as
being "obviously in bed with Microsoft", so I'm not sure how much having
Xamarin as a third party would help.

------
plg
The changes in company behavior have been absolutely stunning since Ballmer
left. Hopefully these changes signal a more modern, forward looking Microsoft
going forward.

~~~
qntmfred
these changes were in the works long before ballmer left FYI

------
cwt137
What does this mean for the Mono project? [http://www.mono-
project.com/Main_Page](http://www.mono-project.com/Main_Page)

~~~
level
This is still Windows only. If anything Mono now has more resources to pull
from to improve their project.

~~~
ygra
It's a compiler. It takes input and produces output. There shouldn't be much
in there that has any platform dependency.

~~~
pritambaral
For any compiler, platform-dependence of the compiler itself is strictly tied
to platform-dependence of outputs.

Edit: I confused roslyn with the recently announced AOT compiler.

~~~
kyberias
What do you mean the output produced isn't platform-independent? This C#
compiler produces assemblies that can be run on e.g. Mono runtime on Linux or
on the .NET CLR runtime in Windows.

------
quux
Anyone else getting deja vu?

Makes me think of Sun open sourcing Java.

~~~
shmerl
Sun retained restrictions on mobile Java though and it wasn't opened royalty
free. That's the whole story with Oracle attacking Google later (on patent
basis). And don't forget, MS sided with Oracle there, claiming that APIs
should be copyrightable.

So while this development is positive, one should take it with a grain of
salt. MS still can't be just trusted blindly.

~~~
McGlockenshire
The releases are under Apache License 2, which has both a patent grant and a
patent retaliation clause.

~~~
shmerl
That's good. But that's just the compiler. What about APIs (i.e. .NET)? I
don't think Oracle claimed ownership over Java compilers in the example above.
It was primarily about Java APIs.

~~~
Mikeb85
The precedent has already been set that API's aren't patentable... So I think
we're good.

~~~
shmerl
From that perspective yes. But MS clearly showed they didn't like that. It was
about the attitude in general. If MS want to really open things up, they
should formally have an open license for APIs that would protect them from MS
patent and copyright threats.

------
marpalmin
I think that Microsoft is doing a really smart move. Xamarin is towards being
the main framework for cross platform mobile development and Microsoft is
positioning itself very well there.

------
_superposition_
Nice start, but the real power is in the open platform, not the language IMHO.
This becomes less of an issue as things move to the cloud and paas, but we're
not there yet. Yes, there's mono, but its still the red headed step child.

------
lovemenot
Is it in the realm of possibility that XP could go the same way? I can imagine
why Microsoft might want to release that albatross, but I have no idea whether
or how they could contain the damage due to leakage of their IP.

~~~
grandpoobah
Sorry but that is the dumbest thing I've read all day.

~~~
lovemenot
Hey no need to apologise. Please tell: are you dissatisfied with the level of
dumbness in your day so far, or are you looking for a more stable normality or
enlightenment?

------
weavie
Interesting to see that they don't shy away from using goto in their code.

[http://roslyn.codeplex.com/SourceControl/latest#Src/Compiler...](http://roslyn.codeplex.com/SourceControl/latest#Src/Compilers/CSharp/Source/Parser/Lexer.cs)

Something I've just learned from looking at the code is you can jump between
cases in a switch statement :

    
    
        switch (a) {
           case '1':
             ...
           case '2':
             goto case '1';
        }
     

Never realised you could do that.

~~~
ygra
Sometimes you even have to, because fall-through is illegal in C# except with
empty case labels. goto case makes things more explicit.

Although there is no reason why they _wouldn 't_ use goto. The oft-cited "goto
statement considered harmful" was in a _very_ different context and basically
just ranted against using goto when there are control structures that make
intent clearer.

------
kclay
Man Microsoft is changing, this is great news.

------
j_s
Is this the 2014 edition of the Rotor Project[1], where Microsoft dumped a
bunch of code to run .NET on XP/OSX/FreeBSD and then almost nothing happened?
Hopefully the choice of a standard license this time will give this release a
chance.

[1] [http://www.microsoft.com/en-
us/download/details.aspx?id=1412...](http://www.microsoft.com/en-
us/download/details.aspx?id=14124#)

~~~
jongalloway2
I think the big difference is that .NET and Visual Studio will depend on the
Roslyn compiler. Rotor was a sample implementation, but nobody at Microsoft
(to my knowledge) was shipping an actual product / project that depended on
Rotor moving forward. I've talked to leads on the team who are excited about
being able to roll out new language features using this new compiler. There's
a good, long term business justification for Microsoft to keep working on this
after open sourcing it, which I've learned over time is a very good and
important thing.

------
NicoJuicy
Microsofts decision to opensource is not suddenly.

It has actively been pushed by some of Microsoft's evangelists (Phil Haack (ex
employee, works at github now i think) and Scott Hansselman to say the more
popular names).

I believe they got some playfield to do things and now the community has more
and more impact (eg. Nuget and software like myget which is based on Nuget
(Nuget for Enterprise))

Also, the CEO isn't Balmer anymore, that probably helps to.

------
elwell
Commit history only goes back to Mar 18 [0]. Presumably, to hide code that
needed to be cleaned up before the release. Would've been interesting to see
the full history, mistakes and all; a full view of their dev process.

[0] -
[http://roslyn.codeplex.com/SourceControl/list/changesets?pag...](http://roslyn.codeplex.com/SourceControl/list/changesets?page=7)

------
vanilla
I fell that they are doing it because of a growing threat from Linux as a
Windows alternative.

With Valve pushing their Debian fork and more gaming support for Linux in the
last time, Microsoft wan't to appeal to the Open Source community the reduce
the "bashing" which ... which could actually loose some force behind it. Not
that it could actually benefit Linux with better Mono support etc.

------
jestinjoy1
Open Sourcing everything! Today read they will be releasing Windows os for IoT
free! Looks like Opensource is the next business model! :)

------
JackMorgan
I hope for a C# and F# plugin to Intellij IDEA! Please add it JetBrains!

------
Illniyar
Go Nadella go!

------
tolmasky
I really hope Unity is able to incorporate this somehow so we can finally get
a solid update to C# and .NET.

~~~
jamesgeck0
Unity's version of Mono was pretty old last I checked; if they haven't updated
it for new versions of Mono, I'm not getting my hopes up too much for Roslyn.
Also, this doesn't include source for a runtime.

~~~
tolmasky
They hadn't updated Mono for licensing issues. Hence them hopefully being able
to take advantage of this.

------
ckaygusu
This is just the beginning. While I hate their business model and corporate
mindset, Microsoft has really well thought out products that can easily make
an impact outside their ecosystem. I'm glad they are realising this, and %100
sure there will be more coming from this direction.

------
aceperry
Wow, you know that the times are a'changing when something like this happens.
Ex-chairman Steve Ballmer used to call linux a cancer and MS had nothing but
disdain for open source software. Open source really has made a difference,
and Microsoft is reacting in a big way.

------
nodivbyzero
Microsoft uses Git. Is it not cool?

Microsoft, please add unix terminal instead of start button in Windows 8.

~~~
kyllo
Just use Powershell, or install Cygwin. What good is a unix terminal without a
unix filesystem, anyway?

~~~
mg74
Its not the filesystem thats the problem, but the terrible partitioned-
backslash-ridden namespace. Come on MS, embrace the forward slash already.

~~~
tracker1
I haven't noticed the forward slash not working anywhere I need to use paths,
from the command prompt and elsewhere.. it doesn't work for tab completion at
a command prompt though.

You can always use a bash/cygwin prompt for that if you want.

~~~
mg74
The forward slash in paths only sort of works but not really. And because you
can sort of use forward slash and backslash for paths deliminators you can't
escape spaces in path names.

And why did they have to screw up tab completion like that? More like tab
cycling. Why does MS always have to be different just for the sake of being
different?

MS whole approach to the cli grinds my gears. And Powershell fixes nothing.

~~~
lzybkr
You can get bash style completion in PowerShell with
[https://github.com/lzybkr/PSReadLine](https://github.com/lzybkr/PSReadLine).

------
GFunc
No more ".Net magic" now that the curtain's dropped.

I think this will help .Net devs make smarter decisions about their code now
that they can see what's happening in the background.

~~~
kyberias
I'm not sure whether there ever was a time when .NET devs had to seriously
consider "what was happening in the background". .NET Framework documentation
has always been pretty good. Not too many dark corners there.

~~~
pritambaral
Not a .NET dev myself, but I believe Android's documentation is also pretty
good. Nevertheless, I can distinctly recall instances when looking at
Android's source was necessary/helpful.

~~~
ygra
Having done a lot of C# and Java (both of which are very well documented) in
the past and a little bit of Android development recently, I cannot confirm
that. The documentation is a horrible mess of a few helpful things (most
longer texts introducing platform quirks and intricacies _are_ useful), barely
documented things (many, many parts of the class libraries) and downright
undocumented things (styles, where the "documentation" even tells you to read
the source). (Not to mention the plethora of typos and misspellings in the
official docs.)

Generally I've not been very impressed with the quality of Android's
documentation and firmly believe a company such as Google can do better. And
after having a look at the process around getting a patch approved I deemed it
not worth my time trying to contribute documentation fixes and enhancements.

------
az0xff
I'm stupid, so I must ask:

What does this mean for the future of C# on Linux?

~~~
a8da6b0c91d
I mean, really that's the only relevant question: when is C# going to be a
great cross platform choice? Open sourcing a windows only implementation
doesn't really change anything.

------
sytelus
Does this mean one can now take this code and build compiler that targets
Mac/Linux platforms? How about forking this to build new variants of C#?

~~~
jongalloway2
Yes and yes. Standard Apache 2 license.

------
sgy
Now with Windows free and many of its work is open-sourced, Microsoft is going
to try to make money on services and other software that comes with Windows.
It's a risk, but better than the alternative: watching Android completely
takes over the planet.

It's not an advertising company like Google. Google makes money when you use
the Internet; Microsoft makes money when you pay for its software.

------
Yuioup
This means that you can compile .NET code on a non-MS platform (like Linux)
but you can only deploy it to ... Azure.

Microsoft's endgame is in sight.

~~~
jongalloway2
How exactly did you get that out of an Apache 2 license?
[http://roslyn.codeplex.com/license](http://roslyn.codeplex.com/license)

~~~
Yuioup
Well obviously you can eventually run the code on any platform that supports
the CLR. At present only Windows and Azure support the CLR but the rest of the
world has to depend on Mono.

I suspect that Microsoft is trying to fight their way into the Server space
where Linux installations are prevalent by offering services via Azure.

So, for example, you have an extensive Linux environment running critical
back-end services. You can have a BASH script which generates C# code,
compiles it and eventually deploys it to Azure. This is I think a fantasy
scenario that Microsoft is envisioning.

~~~
jsmeaton
> Well obviously you can eventually run the code on any platform that supports
> the CLR. At present only Windows and Azure support the CLR but the rest of
> the world has to depend on Mono.

I don't understand what you're trying to say here. The roslyn compiler can
generate code that can be run on the Mono VM. It was even demonstrated by
Miguel on stage.

You'd also need _something_ to run the roslyn compiler on linux, and that
again would be mono.

Visual Studio will be using the roslyn compiler in the next version also.

Azure doesn't really have anything to do with this. It's an open source
compiler that can run on the .NET VM or the Mono VM, and generate output for
either.

------
chj
Is it possible to get it run on Linux/Mac?

------
pekk
I guess they are about done promoting C#, then

------
guiomie
Is there any blog post/documentation/diagrams to help understand the compiler
and how each modules interact between each other ? I'm going thru the code and
its cryptic for me.

Also, I read a lot of comments saying this way good for mono ... how is this ?
Wouldn't an open source CLR be more useful ?

------
Tloewald
Is the CLR runtime open-source too? Because open sourcing the C# compiler
isn't such a big deal without it.

------
damian2000
Great news. A 180° turn since Ballmer compared linux and open source to
communism 14 years ago ...
[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2000/07/31/ms_ballmer_linux_is_...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2000/07/31/ms_ballmer_linux_is_communism/)

------
jimmcslim
I wonder what the impact of this is for Resharper, Jetbrains .Net refactoring
tool, and their Nitra effort?

~~~
jsmeaton
Hopefully some kind of open source tooling that is capable of replacing or
competing with Resharper.

------
novaleaf
lots of positive sounding stuff comming from msft in the last week.

But, I dunno. I'm extremely skeptical of Microsoft's ability to put long-term
momentum into any of their non-core strategies. All these things are one re-
org away from becoming basket cases.

Case in point: XNA

------
Yuioup
Yes! I hope somebody will create a VB.NET to C# convertor with this.

~~~
MartinCron
I would expect that you could use a decompiler to generate C# from compiled
VB.NET code.

~~~
Yuioup
True but you lose the variable names and the comments. I am guessing - and I
really don't know if this is the case - you can convert VB.NET to C# using
Roslyn keeping all the variable names and comments.

------
irishjohnnie
I was hoping they would update Rotor to reflect the new CLR

------
matheusbn
Microsoft should have done this announce two days ago! :)

------
pritambaral
What about the AOT compiler recently announced?

------
sagargv
How does Microsoft benefit by open sourcing the C# compiler ? How will this
drive users/developers towards Windows ?

------
vmmenon
i wish they would post the sources of the initial basic that bill and paul
wrote.

------
copter
I suspect Scott Hanselman has huge impact on this. Thanks for pushing it
Scott.

~~~
shanselman
Lots of folks involved, LOTS, but I (and others) will keep pushing until they
fire me.

------
ilitirit
Who is going to break the news to Slashdot?

------
arjn
Wow, big changes at MS.

------
faruzzy
Now we're talking!

------
duongkai
It's a good sign.

------
duongkai
It's a good sign

------
jhprks
I think we're all very lucky to have a corporation as innovative, open-minded,
and generous as Microsoft. Microsoft is a company that every company should
look up to.

~~~
beagle3
This does not make up for decades of abuse they've been giving the market at
large. Yes, I've witnessed it first hand as early as 1990, and second hand
ever since. They're still extorting android handset makers, and it was only 5
years ago that they loaded the ISO committees to favor OOXML.

------
notastartup
What sort of changes can we see from this move? Could we generate ASP code by
writing it in PHP first? Can .NET be run on Apache and linux servers?

------
leccine
RIP Java! :)

------
anaphor
Great, now GPL the entire windows kernel :)

------
paulftw
What about the past statements of MS executives? e.g. "A Microsoft legal
representative has said during a hearing in the European Parliament that open
source actually presents a higher vulnerability risk."

------
Touche
Step in the right direction. I'm still waiting for

    
    
      git clone https://github.com/microsoft/windows.git
    

to happen

~~~
romanovcode
How much of a hipster are you?

~~~
Touche
I'm a hipster because I like open source and want more not-open-source things
to be open source?

~~~
EpicEng
No, you're a hipster because you seem to think nothing is truly open until
it's on git.

~~~
orblivion
From [http://roslyn.codeplex.com/](http://roslyn.codeplex.com/) :

    
    
        git clone https://git01.codeplex.com/roslyn
    

Do you mean on git _hub_?

~~~
EpicEng
Yes, yes I did.

------
ndesaulniers
It's great to see M$ embracing open source. If you think Open Source is
important, let me know! [https://github.com/nickdesaulniers/What-Open-Source-
Means-To...](https://github.com/nickdesaulniers/What-Open-Source-Means-To-Me)

