

Myths about Managed Code - baha_man
http://blogs.msdn.com/clrteam/archive/2009/10/02/five-myths-about-managed-code.aspx

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y0ghur7_xxx
"On the other hand, there are still scenarios in which managed code simply
cannot be used today (such as building the CLR itself or the debugger)."

I thought the Mono CLR is written in C#, as is the C# compiler which compiles
itself. Did I misunderstand something?

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snprbob86
You can write a self-hosting compiler for C# quite easily. However, the core
of the runtime is going to be a major pain in the ass to write self hosting.

The Mono guys came to the same conclusion, their tree contains oodles of
C/C++:
[http://www.google.com/codesearch?as_package=mono&as_file...](http://www.google.com/codesearch?as_package=mono&as_filename=\\.h$)

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Maro
Visual Studio is implemented in managed code? What part(s)?

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wyday
Nearly the whole thing. Visual Studio 2010 even goes as far as to use WPF
(Windows Presentation Foundation) - a GUI layer entirely written in managed
code.

Of course, satellite dll's & exe tools aren't all written in managed code.
It's silly to re-write everything. But the main Visual Studio application has
been at least partially managed since the Visual Studio 2002 days.

P.S. I don't work for MS, but I do know this for a fact.

~~~
snprbob86
I work for MS and do Visual Studio integration work for XNA Game Studio.

The whole of VS isn't even close to being mostly managed code. While it is
true that 2010's GUI is _mostly_ managed code, thanks to WPF, the internals
are entirely COM. The project system, debuggers, command system, and many
other large components are all C++/COM. Even many of the components which are
managed read more like C++ than like C# due to all the QueryInterface and ref
counting nonsense.

Developer devision, commonly known as DevDiv, contains the VS team,
programming language teams, and many other related teams. DevDiv is by far the
company's largest consumer of managed code. I'd bet that there is more managed
code in DevDiv's source tree than the rest of the company combined. That
doesn't mean they threw out 30+ years of efforts and backwards compatibility
all at once.

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wyday
I was referring to GUI of Visual Studio - but thanks for the clarification. I
didn't mean to imply MS replaced 30 years of code in one go. I should've
written more carefully.

