CoreCLR is now open source

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dotnet/archive/2015/02/03/coreclr-is-now-open-source.aspx

by xyziemba • 11 years ago

709 333 11 years ago

blogs.msdn.com

Touche• 11 years ago

And they have Issues and Pull Requests turned on.

4ad• 11 years ago

Can you turn off pull requests?

calpaterson• 11 years ago

No, you can only turn off issues

jongalloway2• 11 years ago

Some pull requests have already been merged, e.g. https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr/pull/35

frik• 11 years ago

Next step, WinForms

sz4kerto2• 11 years ago

I don't think they are going to open-source legacy stuff that they want people to forget. .Net, ASP.NET, CLR -- all of it is technology they want to keep.

pjmlp5• 11 years ago

I wish.

One of the projects I am currently working on, a greenfield application, requires WindowsForms for reasons I cannot expose here.

mwcampbell• 11 years ago

I think it would be more interesting and useful to have the source for WPF, given that WPF is an actual GUI toolkit implementing its own widgets, whereas WinForms is basically just a wrapper around Win32.

jameshart• 11 years ago

Unfortunately, I think a lot of the interesting parts of WPF are just wrappers around DirectX APIs.

MichaelGG4• 11 years ago

And WPF seems pretty slick. I've only used it as a developer who has little UI skill, but it seemed to be far better than other UI kits. The design seemed rather coherent. Too bad performance and rendering issues hurt it for the first half decade of its life.

grokys• 11 years ago

Just a quick plug then for my own project: https://github.com/grokys/Perspex/

edwinnathaniel• 11 years ago

I'm still waiting for a good cross-platform UI toolkit with good tools and ecosystems around it without resorting to C++ (Qt) or JS approach (atom/nw).

C++ tooling is behind its time (CMake, no dependency management) and JS approach seems kludgy right now.

Java was pretty close (JDK .. or NetBeans, support packaging to Windows or Mac AppStore) but the UI component for OSX is not pleasing and would be nice if it can produce something for Ubuntu/Redhat at least (don't care Arch or the rest at the moment).

Basically I want something better than what Oracle Java has to offer today :)

PS: I would require a great IDE, unit-testing/automation-testing, good scriptable build (Maven/Gradle style, not Ant/NAnt/MSBuild).

damian2000• 11 years ago

Sounds like the only thing that would fit your bill would be IntelliJ IDEA using Java bindings for either wxWidgets, Qt or GTK+?

ziahamza• 11 years ago

I agree. Xamarin guys have done a great job at delivering cross platform UI, making C# first class on most platform, but their API's still lag behind .Net official framework and are stuck to the .Net 4.0 era.

mike_hearn4• 11 years ago

You should look at JavaFX. I just finished an app based on it. It's the official replacement for Swing and is quite WPF like in nature (scene graph oriented, etc).

Although there are skins that can make it look native on each platform, I didn't bother with this for my app. Trying to match native on a cross platform app is a fools errand. A few months after you ship your app, the OS developers will decide to reskin everything and anything not using their native toolkit will look out of place. So my app takes its inspiration from Twitter Bootstrap and just doesn't even try to look native. You can skin JavaFX with CSS so it's quite easy to match the look, at least in some ways. Nobody has complained and quite a few people said the app looks great. I would definitely do this again for my future apps. Pick a nice design that isn't native to any platform in particular, and people won't hate you for it.

BTW Java now comes with a packager tool that makes self contained native installers which don't depend on the user having Java installed. Deployment is a lot more practical these days.

akoeplinger• 11 years ago

I ported Mono's WinForms implementation to .NET Core some time ago as a proof of concept: https://twitter.com/akoeplinger/status/546832629010817024

Would be great if MS open-sourced WinForms as well so we could fill in the gaps.

lubos• 11 years ago

Java Swing turned out to be a failure because it didn't look native on any platform.

I would recommend something like Eto.Forms (https://github.com/picoe/Eto) which is an abstraction over native GUI toolkits (WPF, WinForms, GTK+, Cocoa)

Works really well and mature.

jvickers• 11 years ago

My impression of Java UI components was that they looked boring and old-fashioned. It's a subjective judgement, but I guess others would have thought that way too. If Java Swing or other parts of the Java UI toolkit looked better than many native GUIs then there would have been more interest.

pron5• 11 years ago

Ironic, then, that many of the most popular IDEs in the world right now are based on Swing.

yellowapple6• 11 years ago

MIT-licensed, even.

unknownian• 11 years ago

I wonder why they would do this. In fact, I don't see the benefit of MIT over Apache except for compatibility with GPLv2. But I'm definitely not an expert, if someone would want to explain.

cwyers• 11 years ago

Parts of Mono are GPLv2, maybe they want Mono (and thus Xamarin) to have the freedom to use as much of this as possible.

tedunangst• 11 years ago

Less words.

rikkus• 11 years ago

The Apache licence grants patent rights. Microsoft make patent promises elsewhere, so using Apache might confuse matters.

maxlybbert2• 11 years ago

I have no idea what mattered to Microsoft, but my view is that MIT is just simpler. There really aren't too many disagreements on what the license requires.

Additionally, if you don't truly plan on enforcing many requirements of the license (e.g., if a distributor fails to "cause any modified files to carry prominent notices stating that You changed the files" (4.b.), will you send them a letter telling them to correct the problem?), then why bother using a license that includes those requirements?

moonchrome• 11 years ago

except for compatibility with GPLv2

I suppose this is important to Mono guys as mono is GPL AFAIK.

jader201• 11 years ago

Direct link to repo:

https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr

benreic• 11 years ago

Quick link to what I think is the most interesting class in the CLR:

https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr/blob/master/src/mscorlib/s...

simfoo• 11 years ago

From their GetHashCode():

// We want to ensure we can change our hash function daily.

// This is perfectly fine as long as you don't persist the

// value from GetHashCode to disk or count on String A

// hashing before string B. Those are bugs in your code.

hash1 ^= ThisAssembly.DailyBuildNumber;

I'd love to hear the story behind this one :D

daeken• 11 years ago

I don't know the story, but the logic behind it is simple: If you want to guarantee no one depends on GetHashCode staying static between runs of an application, change it all the time.

euroclydon• 11 years ago

It's in a #if DEBUG statement so it would not change. Historically, even if they shipped the debug symbols, the assembly would have been built in release. Now, I suppose you could build it in debug.

gus_massa• 11 years ago

IIRC, a few yeas ago appeared a denial of service attack, probably originally for Phyton, but it was ported son to other languages.

The idea is that the hash is good enough for normal list, but it's not a cryptographic hash and it's easy to find collisions. Then you can make a lot of requests with strings that has the same hash value. Now the hash operations are O(N) instead of O(~1) and everything is slower.

Using an unpredictable hash calculation makes this attack more difficult.

Aleman3603• 11 years ago

The Reference Source site is much easier to navigate. Method names are hyperlinks:

http://referencesource.microsoft.com/#mscorlib/system/string...

DoggettCK2• 11 years ago

That does answer an unanswered question I had on SO about string hashing. If strings are immutable, why isn't the hash code memoized? Seems like it would make HashSet/Dictionary lookups using string keys much faster.

munificent3• 11 years ago

Presumably because it's not worth the memory hit to store the hash.

munificent3• 11 years ago

Since I wrote a string hash code function recently[1], I was interested to see what they use. Like many, they're using[2] the venerable djb hash. That sent me down a rabbit hole where I discovered that Bernstein was 19 when he wrote about it. Wow.

[1] https://github.com/munificent/wren/blob/master/src/wren_valu...

[2] https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr/blob/master/src/mscorlib/s...

sekasi• 11 years ago

Admittedly, I've never been big in C#, but I'm AMAZED by how much repetition string comparison there is.

IE: Environment.GetResourceString("ArgumentOutOfRange_Index")

The string there is in multiple areas of that class, and the same behavior is displayed for all of them. Wouldn't logic suggest everything such as above would be moved in to a constant repository for clarity and also less potential human error for future additions?

Rapzid6• 11 years ago

It's pretty common in C# to use Constants to represent strings. Cuts down on the repetition as you said and you get the Intellisense too. I'd be curios to know the reasoning for using the literals as well.

mike_hearn4• 11 years ago

And for comparison:

http://grepcode.com/file/repository.grepcode.com/java/root/j...

It's sort of surprising to me how much huger the .NET version is, in terms of code. Virtually all the lines in the Java version are API docs. The .NET version doesn't seem to have them (they must be elsewhere?) but it does have a lot more code and that code is much lower level.

Not sure what that means, if anything, but it's interesting.

sz4kerto2• 11 years ago

Interesting commit:

https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr/commit/90ef39bc3c9886e7967...

"This change fixes a potential problem in unwinding on Linux"

wtetzner2• 11 years ago

Interesting quote from README.md:

"You can 'watch' the repo to see Linux and Mac support being added over the next few months."

johnduhart• 11 years ago

They already seem to be compiling for Linux on Jenkins: http://dotnet-ci.cloudapp.net/view/dotnet_coreclr/

Aleman3603• 11 years ago

From the article:

Today, .NET Core builds and runs on Windows. We will be adding Linux and Mac implementations of platform-specific components over the next few months. We already have some Linux-specific code in .NET Core, but we’re really just getting started on our ports. We wanted to open up the code first, so that we could all enjoy the cross-platform journey from the outset.

j_baker• 11 years ago

This is on github. Does this mean that MS is abandoning CodePlex?

simcop2387• 11 years ago

From other articles[1] it looks that way. Really makes you think how big github has become.

[1] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/01/15/codeplex_repository_...

carussell2• 11 years ago

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8869401

_nedR2• 11 years ago

To me Github has become a social networking website for developers (bear with me). As a social networking website its sort of half-way between Instagram (instead of sharing pictures you share code) and LinkedIn (It serves as a programmer's online profile ).

As a social-networking website, the most important thing that defines it is the number of users. You could publish your code on Codeplex or Bitbucket, but you would be simply limiting your reach.

hbbio• 11 years ago

Probably the same way Google is now shifting to https://github.com/google instead of its own Google Code!

stevecalifornia• 11 years ago

I am really interested to see what happens once ASP.Net is running on Linux. C# and Visual Studio are fantastic, mature tools and I think a lot of developers would enjoy using them whereas they might be hesitant at the moment due to OS lock-in on the code they are writing.

Raphael• 11 years ago

Could/Does Visual Studio run in Linux?

artmageddon• 11 years ago

Not yet. MonoDevelop is the closest you'll get at the moment.

Delmania• 11 years ago

I'm not sure they will migrate Visual Studio. First they'd need to move WPF, which is implemented in DirectX. Second, Visual Studio and MSDN are still profitable. Third, there's the Omnisharp project that;s working on providing support for the more common IDEs on linux. In fact, there's nothing stopping people from making Eclipse and IntelliJ plugins.

alkonaut• 11 years ago

No, in it's current form it probably won't be ported to a non-windows platform. This isn't to say there never will be an IDE called Visual Studio that looks like a current Visual Studio that runs on more platforms in the future.

chriscub2• 11 years ago

Funny thing is that internal to Microsoft, most devs don't use Visual Studio as an IDE. Maybe as an editor or a debugger, but there are a lot of build systems out within Microsoft and most of them don't plug into Visual Studio.

IMO, open sourcing Visual Studio itself is not all that interesting vs. open sourcing the .NET platform.

jerleth2• 11 years ago

No, which is _the_ reason I am on windows.

stirno• 11 years ago

There are several groups working to fill the gap left by VS not running on non-windows platforms (including my own company). There will be options!

sanatgersappa• 11 years ago

No. But check out http://www.omnisharp.net/

MichaelGG4• 11 years ago

ASP.NET already runs on .NET with Mono, but not always the latest versions of things. Having it all open source could bridge that compatibility gap and let us fully enjoy the ecosystem, instead of having to be careful with taking dependencies all over.

cdmckay• 11 years ago

ASP.NET support on Mono is very shaky, with random things missing. I tried to develop a Mono ASP.NET MVC app on it recently and I had to switch to Windows due to the number of issues.

adrianlmm2• 11 years ago

There is more chance to see VS in OSX tan in Linux.

dkarapetyan3• 11 years ago

I really like the new Microsoft. Ballmer was really trying to run the company into the ground.

unfamiliar• 11 years ago

I'm not sure those two statements are related. I don't see how having .NET open sourced is directly effecting Microsoft's bottom line. I like getting free stuff too, but that doesn't man it is necessarily profitable for the company.

azakai• 11 years ago

First of all, it's not just opening up .NET. It's also many other cool things Microsoft has been doing: Linux on Azure, TypeScript, etc. etc.

Regarding .NET, it is likely it will benefit Microsoft significantly. First, because Microsoft would not do it without strong reasons. Second, we can guess at those reasons: Microsoft wants to grow its developer ecosystem. .NET has been limited due to being Windows-focused. Opening it up makes sense.

(Yes, Mono exists, but the .NET cross-platform experience still wasn't good enough. Not necessarily Mono's fault, but regardless, opening .NET can solve this (possibly at a cost to Mono).)

mdaniel2• 11 years ago

IMHO, it's the "open" part and less the "source" part. I believe a lot of projects were reluctant to jump on the Mono train because they expected it would be steamrolled (on purpose or just through sheer manpower) by the .NET. However, if everyone is building on top of the same CoreCLR, it's possible that fear might subside. I doubt it will ever go away because Microsoft will continue to keep some APIs close to the vest.

If it's possible to transpile either Java source or better Java class files to a CLR assembly, even some of the community momentum that Java has might turn into a benefit for .NET, too.

brudgers11• 11 years ago

Think about all the things that Wall Street has said Microsoft should do over the past decade. None of them was "more open source."

All the groundwork was done by Ballmer. It had to be because now that he and Gates have reduced their ownership stake and are no longer the two largest shareholders, Wall Street's flavor of the month ideas cannot be ignored.

The 'new' Microsoft has been building at least since they hired Hanselman back around 2008. He was talking then on his podcast about taking the job to advocate open source. Even then Microsoft worked with the Mono team. They moved Office to an open file format.

It takes a long time to change an aircraft carrier's course. This is Ballmer's strategic vision. His passion for developers even made it onto Youtube.

dkarapetyan3• 11 years ago

Hmm, I didn't think of it that way but I guess you're right. Unfortunate then that Ballmer will not get any of the credit.

ptx3• 11 years ago

They moved Office to an open file format.

Or rather: When OpenDocument was standardized by ISO and threatened to create demand for open, common, standardized interchange formats, they created a similarly and confusingly named XML version of their existing format, with insufficient documentation to allow complete third-party implementations, and pushed it as a competing ISO standard, using tricks such as (accidentally, I believe they said) encouraging partner companies to join standards bodies just for the vote: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_Standards_Institute#The...

giancarlostoro• 11 years ago

I wonder how this would aid projects such as IronPython and IronRuby if at all, just out of curiosity. My only dream is that they eventually have VS on Linux.

ianlevesque• 11 years ago

Probably the most immediate winner is Unity. They've been stuck on an ancient version of Mono because they did not want to license tech from Xamarin. They can now have MS derived runtimes free.

nkozyra• 11 years ago

Wow, didn't even think about that. Huge step for the Unity project.

numo16• 11 years ago

Unity has been developing their own runtime for a while now to get away from the mono licensing costs of using a new version. I'll be interested to see how they react to Microsoft open-sourcing a lot of stuff they might have been able to use.

fsloth12• 11 years ago

In terms of velocity and trifty syntax F# is almost as nice as these dynamic languages. It can even be used for scripting.

Sanddancer3• 11 years ago

Not much, I imagine. .net's been supporting languages like that for a long time through the Dynamic Language Runtime. Although, if more people use Iron(Python|Ruby|Scheme), the underlying runtimes, and quite possibly the DLR itself could see some code contribution loving.

Rapzid6• 11 years ago

I'm hoping ClojureCLR gets some more attention now too.

leppie• 11 years ago

I am hoping to hack a bit on the runtime to add some missing features to IronScheme (read: proper continuations!).

Nelkins• 11 years ago

I would be curious to see the effects of completely open-sourcing Windows. Businesses would continue to use it, because it's Microsoft and they want enterprise support. I think it would get even more love than it already does from the development community. Piracy of Windows is already rampant, so they're not really in a worse position from that (plus I think that most people who can pay for Windows do so already). Foreign governments who are concerned about NSA backdoors would have their fears allayed. Is there any way it could seriously damage their business model?

otterley2• 11 years ago

As a practical matter, I doubt that they can. There's probably quite a lot of third-party code intertwined with Windows itself (especially in the device drivers that ship with it) that's subject to strict redistribution and publication restrictions.

bigdubs2• 11 years ago

Device drivers can be divorced from the core os.

jstanek• 11 years ago

Potentially Microsoft could use their significant market power to convince other companies to open source their code.

jiggy2011• 11 years ago

Large enterprises would continue to pay for support, individuals and small business might not. It could cut license sales in half.

maxlybbert2• 11 years ago

Sometimes I forget that they did the Shared Source release several years ago. However, once in a while I see it mentioned in an academic paper.

Point being, the most common reason companies give for not releasing source for a project is that they have code from contractors that they aren't able to release. That shouldn't be the case with Windows.

thanksgiving• 11 years ago

Point being, the most common reason companies give for not releasing source for a project is that they have code from contractors that they aren't able to release. That shouldn't be the case with Windows.

There are probably some parts that won't make it like Pinball [old new thing] but it shouldn't be significant at all.

> Hey everybody asking that the source code be released: The source code was licensed from another company. If you want the source code, you have to go ask them.

[old new thing] blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2012/12/18/10378851.aspx

oDot• 11 years ago

Aren't the forks the real threat for Microsoft in open sourcing Windows?

brudgers11• 11 years ago

Who is going to support 20 million lines of code other than Microsoft employees as amateurs bungle their way through thirty years of patches for backward compatibility wrapped around stupid and clever things OEM's and third party developers did to get their code to work?

It's not like Linux because there isn't a team of experienced volunteers already working on the code base and the Windows code base contains a lot functionality for business reasons that Torvalds has been in a position to not just say "no" but to add "and go fuck yourself."

njharman• 11 years ago

No one "supports" it. People will improve the bits that bother them. In the aggregate, these activities amount to more than you could ever pay to have done.

The beauty of open source model is it gives the desperately motivated the means to fix their problems in a way that benefits everyone.

pekk• 11 years ago

The answer is that nobody will support it as-is... they would just use the source to make or improve other things. Because this is what would be in the interests of the users. Even if it meant Windows got buried.

But this is strictly imaginary because I doubt that 20 million lines of code are all under the unilateral control of Microsoft.

zodiac• 11 years ago

You're right, it would be hard to contribute to such a codebase. I think the benefits of open sourcing Windows aren't really "developers will start contributing to it" as much as "developers will start reading the source code". Microsoft would continue supporting it.

e12e• 11 years ago

I wonder what, if any, the implications are for the future of ReactOS as more and more of .net is opened up?

[Ed: as for 20mloc -- the opened parts of .net is already at 5mloc...

Also, love seeing stuff like this from tfa:

    git clone https://...corefxlab
    cd ...corefxlab\...HelloWorld
    nuget restore
    msbuild
    .\bin\Debug\HelloWorld.exe

]

aninteger• 11 years ago

It's certainly not "official" but we already have Wine and Mono. I understand that they don't promise write once run anywhere but the support is pretty good. For awhile it was one of the only ways to get Netflix working on Linux based platforms.

otakucode4• 11 years ago

.Net actually promises a bit more 'write once run anywhere' than Java. Java stuff is not, and does not seek to be, binary compatible across platforms. .Net is. I'd really love to see, once .Net is all open, browser makers to throw the CLR into the browser. Overnight it would release us from the tyranny of js and let us use basically any language we ever want.

rodgerd• 11 years ago

Piracy of Windows is already rampant, so they're not really in a worse position from that (plus I think that most people who can pay for Windows do so already).

I seriously doubt piracy of Windows is a huge concern in most markets; MS will still be making a lot of money from Dell, HP, Lenovo, et al selling their stuff.

WorldWideWayne2• 11 years ago

I don't see why everything needs to be open source. People who simply don't like Microsoft will not use it just because it's open. Quite the opposite I think - they'd probably immediately fork it and provide an alternate download in order to hurt Microsoft.

Are foreign governments a big market that Microsoft has lost a lot of customers from? I don't think so. The vast majority of the potential market for Windows is already running Windows, so I don't see what they'd really have to gain. The small but loud minority of open-source zealots won't be happy until every single Microsoft product is open.

mahyarm2• 11 years ago

When your debugging code, being able to see all of the code in the stack trace is valuable alone.

xamolxix• 11 years ago

they'd probably immediately fork it and provide an alternate download in order to hurt Microsoft

They would fork it, but that is not why.

derefr• 11 years ago

The first and biggest effect (presuming a GPL-compatible license) is that Wine would suddenly work much better, and so Ubuntu and OSX would likely ship their following versions with "the ability to run Windows software alongside native software with no performance loss" as a feature. OSX N+3 or so might even eliminate Boot Camp, saying that there's no need to install Windows as a whole if all the software "Just Works."

logn2• 11 years ago

How would that hurt Microsoft?

There aren't many people who have bought MS software for years and are now excited to use a fork or their own build. Even assuming that some other mega corp comes along and offers world class support/service and their own fork, it still probably wouldn't hurt MS much.

Most small companies would have released their code as GPL (versus MIT as the case here) to limit the risk of a fork fragmenting everything (not being able to merge forks back in or make everything compatible). But in Microsoft's case, because of their size, few companies could hope to make a better version than MS. Further, MS makes money in lots of ways and this isn't a zero-sum game for them. They'll profit immensely from a more open ecosystem. Companies such as IBM, Apple, Google, and Oracle already have proven it's possible to be profitable with open source.

jsprogrammer2• 11 years ago

I don't see why everything needs to be open source.

I think this goes back to one of the core tenets of free and/or open source software: the user should be able to know, control, and modify exactly what their machine is doing.

If the source is not available you're just running a black box and praying that it will do what the person who gave it to you claims it will do.

yellowapple6• 11 years ago

People who simply don't like Microsoft will not use it just because it's open.

You're forgetting that a lot of people traditionally haven't liked Microsoft because their software wasn't/isn't open. Yeah, Windows would still be a steaming pile of bovine manure regardless of which license it was made available under, but the availability of that source code would make it easy for better, Unix-like operating systems to pick up the necessary pieces to support Windows software, thus continuing to allow Microsoft to profit on their non-operating-system software (Office, SQL Server, Exchange, IIS, Internet Explorer^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HSpartan, etc.) regardless of whether or not Windows itself is widespread in usage.

sourc3• 11 years ago

Nadella has worked on the cloud computing at Microsoft. Microsoft is betting big time on the cloud. Although MS never publicly admits, the OS business for the end user is slowly fading away with the tablets, smart phones taking over and Browser becoming the new OS.

You can see this by looking at their Office 365 strategy (iOS, Android release, online version push). Making Windows 10 free to 8 users, removing licensing fees for windows phones, making Visual Studio available for free. Making the ASP.NET vNext to run on Linux.

Instead, MS sees the growth in Azure. Whether they use Linux or Windows servers, MS can make money off of the enterprise/startup segment. Whether or not it is a sustainable strategy in the long run, we will see. But in the short term, at least for the "consumer" market, MS is giving up on Windows and it is moving its focus to Azure and the software that runs on top of Azure (Office, Sharepoint, Dev Services, XBox, Bing, etc).

The marketing strategy behind this is also interesting. Things are still labeled "Windows" to give the illusion that the "Windows" the end user gets on their new laptop is somehow "related" to the Windows in the cloud (Azure). Interesting strategy to make the "Windows" brand live for a little more at least..

pmontra5• 11 years ago

I'm not sure Windows (and transitively Microsoft) is a positive brand and its continuity an illusion worth keeping. It reminds me of antivirus, slow boots, periodic reinstalls to make XP quick again, BSOD and many other things that drove me away from it years ago. Anyway, if one never tried anything else not to leave home could be reassuring and it seems that Win7 wasn't so bad anymore (but I still get calls from friends with infested Windows machines).

YorkianTones2• 11 years ago

For one, it's big. When I was working on part of the UIPlat team for Windows, my private enlistment just included build infra and maybe 5% of the sources and associated tools/tests and it still took up 60+ GB (100+ GB with binaries). I don't think you can just throw it on Github.

Two, compatibility. Even if you fix a bug, it usually needs to be versioned in some way to avoid breaking apps that rely on the bug. OS code, once shipped, becomes feature. Fixes require a fair amount of due diligence besides just identifying the problem and the correct fix. The historical context of how the issue was introduced and how it has migrated to other branches needs to be understood by grepping through the source history graph. Suites of build verification tests, regression tests, integration tests, and unit tests need to pass. Although Microsoft has extensive infrastructure for buddy builds and integration staging, external parties won't. So at best they could suggest a fix to Microsoft to complete the due diligence on. But usually suggesting a fix is easy and vetting it is the grueling part.

Three, private forks of Windows seem like maintenance and compatibility nightmares. Fragmentation would likely disrupt windows update's ability to apply patches and keep the system secure. Windows' ability to run across so many devices is kept sane by keeping a relatively small, consistent trusted computing base. Merging together forked Windows repos is a disaster. The XBOX team forked Windows 8 for a few months and made some tweaks to get XBOX One out the door, and then some folks had the nasty job of having to try and consolidate the codebases against moving targets. No one has enough context or time to perform these kinds of merges individually, nor would ever volunteer to, so they need to be massive coordinated efforts between teams.

Four, variants. You're not going to want to deal with all the possible permutations of Windows SKUs, processor architectures (ARM/X86/AMD64/IA64), build flavors, etc.

Five, it's a mess. There's plenty of archaic cruft, possible trade secrets, and lurking vulnerabilities. Open sourcing everything would be like opening Pandora's Box. It's too risky. Curating out some portion of this to open-source would be a massive undertaking and ongoing maintenance cost.

I think it makes more sense to take more mature modules, like .NET core or Roslyn, and open source them as separate entities. Modules are more reusable, and community-driven changes are easier to curate when they can be isolated. Windows has some components which it probably makes sense to open-source, but the entity as a whole is too unwieldy in its current form. .NET is designed more modularly.

TL;DR - Windows is an unwieldy behemoth and would be difficult to open source.

UK-AL• 11 years ago

NT source code was leaked ages ago, most people were surprised it was fairly clean code.

ixtli• 11 years ago

Even more reason to port all of your C/C++ code to CMake. I'm excited to see upstream contribution from MS.

stinos• 11 years ago

Exactly, CMake getting more traction like this should be good. I know quite some devs who're like CMake? Why don't you just use good old Makefiles? and then struggle with it's syntax and/or fail to provide working Windows or even Mac builds of their software simply because they stick with plain makefiles. (don't get me wrong, they work fine, just not so much for cross-platform projects)

stefantalpalaru2• 11 years ago

The alternative is not plain Makefiles, but Autotools: https://autotools.io/index.html

fsloth12• 11 years ago

De-Ballmerization and Microsoft is oozing delicious developer love. What the hell happened. It's like Skeletor became He-Mans best buddy all of a sudden and started helping everyone.

I'm thrilled. The MS tooling is really, really good and the only thing stopping me from committing to the stack fully has been it's lack of open sourceness (vendor lock in is still feasible but getting less of an issue).

Edit: Pardon the fanboyism but I've tried a set of feasible Non-MS language options for my particular domain and F# in Visual Studio beats for me, my particular use case and coding style Scala, Clojure, Ruby, Python, Haskell, "browser technologies"...

doodpants• 11 years ago

De-Ballmerization and Microsoft is oozing delicious developer love.

Kind of ironic, what with Ballmer's "Developers developers developers..." spiel.

scrollaway2• 11 years ago

Indeed. For someone who understood the problem, Ballmer sure missed out on understanding the solution.

rdtsc3• 11 years ago

When it comes to propaganda from large and powerful entities, usually it help to reverse the meaning to really understand the message.

"Developers,developers,developer" = Fuck developers,need more profits next quarter.

"We brought peace and democracy to country <X>" = We seriously fucked it up for years to come, and installed a brutal puppet dictator.

"We are not evil like those other mean companies. We will do good in the world" = The main products are the users, who's information it sells it its real users. Have colaborated and been in bed with corrupt governments all across the world.

The list goes on. It is a rather fun heuristic. And once you know about, you'll start seeing it more often.

otakucode4• 11 years ago

Unfortunately, Ballmer's managerial approach is what killed it. He might have known that helping developers was the way to go, but he also thought that competition in the organization would lead to better performance. My understanding is that this idea failed in some of the most vicious and destructive ways possible. I hope that the very visible failure of his cut-throat management style and setting up so many disincentives to cooperation in the organization is highly recognized in management-theory circles. It turns out making your company a terrible place to work with everyone at each others throats isn't a good idea. Whodathunkit?

m_st• 11 years ago

May I ask you what your 'particular domain' is? I'm interested in F# but due to lack of a real use case for me I didn't yet start investigating.

fsloth12• 11 years ago

In this instance: Desktop, graphics. This from a hobby point of view, though! Which means I have very little time to achieve anything and occasionally don't touch the code in weeks. I've come to write code that is a) trifty b) readable c) works on compile d) leverages type system for composable code that has a specific "correct" way to do things.

So I can return to my code, which I've completely forgotten how it works, see that it compiles, read it through, and continue working. Noticeably: I do not need to care about the tooling because it just works. I don't get a shiteload of weird exceptions when I run my code (looking at you, Clojure - yes, I'm a noob) and since the Pythonic and mutable nature of F# allows me to write code in the way I enjoy the most it feels like a glove. There are a few oddities occasionally and some bits are a bit more verbose than in other languages (Clojures collections spoil any other language) but the overall experience is that I can focus only on my code. For me, it's a pain free computational substrate, and free as in beer now that Visual Studio community edition is out.

My progress is really slow but always worthwhile.

If you are interested I found Jon Harrops "Visual F# 2010 for Technical Computing" really good practical introduction, Don Syme et. alls "Expert F#" a good reference book on writing general stuff in the .Net ecosystem with F#, Petricek's "Real-World Functional Programming" a very good introduction to various application patterns and Sestoft's "Programming Language Concepts" a great book and online reference on writing interpreters and compilers (http://www.itu.dk/people/sestoft/plc/).

*At work I use C++ on MS stack.

phkahler3• 11 years ago

It's actually Free Software, not just open source. MIT license.

iwwr• 11 years ago

"Free software" has a narrower meaning in the context of the four freedoms.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software#Definition

tpush• 11 years ago

And if you follow your link, you'll see that the MIT license grants all these freedoms and is thus considered to be a Free Software license.

tree_of_item2• 11 years ago

Eh, most proponents of free software would in fact call this "just open source": MIT isn't copyleft.

adrianmalacoda• 11 years ago

Most proponents of free software would argue that the difference between free software and open source is a philosophical one, not a technical one [0]. Copyleft is preferable, but not mandatory, for a free software license; the most widely used non-copyleft free software licenses are recognized by such by the FSF [1].

[0] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.h...

[1] http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html

adl• 11 years ago

I'm familiar with the philosophical differences between Free Software and Open Source.

But in this context you seem to imply that there are practical differences i.e: Not all Open Source licences are considered Free Software in the practical sense.

If that is the case, could you provide an example?

mackwic4• 11 years ago

The open-source academical licences are a good example. For example, part of the Win32 kernel are open for academic and are heavily share between the classes, but the limitations are here.

For instance, this licence: http://opensource.org/licenses/AFL-3.0

It provide free usage, studying, display, publishing, but also explicitly says that some of the part could be binaries (machine-readable), you can't sell anything derivative, and the licence is personal with no right to give the licence to anyone else.

So, you can consult and modify in the frame of your academical work, but no more.

phkahler3• 11 years ago

> I'm familiar with the philosophical differences between Free Software and Open Source.

But in this context you seem to imply that there are practical differences i.e: Not all Open Source licences are considered Free Software in the practical sense.

The Open Source Initiative (OSI) was certifying all sorts of licenses as "open source" under their definition. Basically if you allowed people to see your source code it was considered open source. That's not really practical and most open source licenses had an agenda of the company retaining control, which means people can't really do what they want. To most developers there are basically the BSD/MIT licenses that allow you to do whatever you want, and the GPL/LGPL licenses that allow you to do what ever you want - so long as you pass that freedom on to your users. These are both forms of Free Software, though the distinction causes much argument. Every other "open source" license is generally more restrictive and meant for someone to retain ultimate control, including the old Microsoft licenses.

In my opinion the OSI did more harm to the movement than good by "certifying" a huge number of irrelevant licenses so companies could claim be doing the cool new thing. None of that code can be integrated into anything else under different terms - at least not without consulting a lawyer.

pmontra5• 11 years ago

I wonder how this strategy is going to affect the bottom line of Microsoft. People writing with CLR languages are deploying web apps mainly (or only) to Windows now. They're going to have an option to deploy to Linux soon. This means less revenues from OS and DB licenses, so it looks bad. Do they expect a large number of people leaving Java, Node, Python, Ruby and picking up C# because of the Linux deploys? Those people would probably have to buy Windows and VisualStudio licenses to code in C# in a VM or just ditch Macs for PCs. More desktop licenses could make up for lost server ones but if I googled well a server costs more than a desktop. Or maybe they're playing a longer game: open source as much as they can, hope some network effect builds up, find out how to profit from it. In the medium term they might be losing money tough. Am I missing something obvious?

adrianlmm2• 11 years ago

Those people would probably have to buy Windows and VisualStudio licenses to code in C# in a VM or just ditch Macs for PCs.

No, they can code in Linux using Vim if they want.

xanadohnt2• 11 years ago

Additionally, full-blown Visual Studio is totally free now. Win10 is practically free or totally free (if upgrading from a valid Win8).

pmontra5• 11 years ago

I never tried C# but I did code in Java with vim and emacs. Not a nice experience. Java more or less requires an IDE. I assumed C# would be the same but I could have assumed too much.

brz• 11 years ago

They can also walk on broken glass with bare feet.

smacktoward• 11 years ago

Or maybe they're playing a longer game: open source as much as they can, hope some network effect builds up, find out how to profit from it.

That was Sun's strategy for Java; it didn't work out well for them. Java became huge, but Sun never did figure out how to make a dollar from it.

joelthelion• 11 years ago

Sun didn't have Azure.

yellowapple6• 11 years ago

There were some potential solutions (like billing SPARC servers and workstations as "Java development/deployment platforms") that Sun started to brush against, but they ran out of time / money / distance from Oracle's sidaM Touch, etc.

usea• 11 years ago

They're betting a lot on Azure, so not all people who switch to Linux servers will be lost customers. They can still run their Linux servers on Azure.

I don't pretend to understand the calculus of the decision, just offering this point you may have overlooked.

pmontra5• 11 years ago

This might be the answer, but it's going to become part of distributions so I could run .NET on Linux on AWS or on my own VPS hosted anywhere. I can't see any reason why Amazon won't provide a Linux .NET image to boot from. Obviously MS can try to provide better and faster images for their Azure servers, maybe even their own distro. I can't wait to see Microsoft Linux Server 2018 :-)

Prices for cloud servers are falling, so do they really plan to take part to a race to the bottom? I remember this discussion from November https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8582096

mythz• 11 years ago

Microsoft have already announced that Visual Studio community edition is free, which also means less revenue from VS.NET licenses as well. Although VS.NET is not a major revenue source, most of the revenue comes for Server licenses, e.g. Windows Server, SQL Server and other integrated products.

But it's fairly easy to determine what their strategy is, given that they've been open sourcing most things that touches Azure. Azure also hosts Linux Servers and given the world is moving towards hosting on Linux, they're following the trend to stay relevant and appeal to more developers.

Basically this comes down to making the .NET ecosystem more appealing and attracting more developers to Microsoft platform and development tools which will integrate seamlessly with their Azure hosting services and other commercial server products.

koyote• 11 years ago

Microsoft have already announced that Visual Studio community edition is free, which also means less revenue from VS.NET licenses as well.

Is it though? I would believe that the people using the community edition are the same people that were previously using the express edition, i.e. hobbyists and students who were not going to pay for it anyhow. And as you already described in your last paragraphs: if their plan works out, I would imagine visual studio license revenues to go up in the long term as more people are attracted to the eco-system.

dkarapetyan3• 11 years ago

As far as statically typed languages go C# is actually great. If I had the option of using it instead of some gimped version of it then hands down that would be my language of choice.

adolfojp• 11 years ago

Making ASP.NET Windows Server only wasn't driving Windows Server sales, it was destroying Windows (and Visual Studio) as a developer platform, and thus, ensuring that no one had any motivation to develop for Windows Phones and tablets. It was a certain path to irrelevance.

Making ASP.NET Linux deployable ensures that Windows stays in the hands of developers. Making Azure Linux friendly ensures that Microsoft can take a slice of that market. And pushing Universal Apps and giving Visual Studio Community and Windows 10, an OS that allows Universal Apps to run on the desktop, for free motivates developers to fill up the app store.

This decision was inevitable and IMHO a huge step in the right direction.

pmontra5• 11 years ago

I had to google what Universal Apps are (Windows is a very remote technology stack for me), got it now.

About the .NET on Linux move, so the strategy could be to make more people willing to develop with .NET, bet that they buy VisualStudio, which means Windows desktop licenses and be prepared to see Windows Server replaced by Linux instances running (hopefully for them) on Azure. For that to work they must be bold in selling Azure and luring developers to the .NET stack. I don't foresee developers leaving their 5/10 years investment on other stacks en masse. Maybe new developers will consider .NET as a viable alternative to all the other open source tecnologies. It's a generational gamble and it's going to pay only if they really can compete against AWS and the other VM providers.

However I understand that they must do something, or they'll end up as the company that makes a console and an OS for video gamers and for cheap computers.

mmgutz• 11 years ago

Is Microsoft actually putting resources on a Mono replacement for Linux and Mac? My understanding is it's still Mono for non-Windows which has had very limited success. Xamarin is mostly concerned with mobile.

_random_• 11 years ago

If they could add native C#(+HTML5) support to Spartan now that would be amazing...

cm21872• 11 years ago

Should we expect more zero days against .net as a short term effect of the source code becoming available?

gtirloni• 11 years ago

Very few people here are qualified to inspect the code in such short notice and look for dangerous code. I think any answer to this question is going to be pure speculation.

Since it's very easy to decompile .NET binaries and Windows has been a traditional place for crackers and what not, I think that code base is very well inspected already.

cm21872• 11 years ago

But I don't think the CLR is in .Net.

wglb• 11 years ago

Open source is no guard against zero days.

saosebastiao• 11 years ago

So I'm still a little fuzzy as to what this means. Is this basically the same thing that Mono is trying to provide? Would it now be possible to have the F# front end link to the CoreCLR backend on Linux?

Naknut• 11 years ago

Thats kind if it. CoreCLR is the runtime that all .NET languages run in. CoreCLR doesn't run on Linux yet but they are working on it and once it dose all .NET languages (Including F#) should run on Linux.

tracker13• 11 years ago

I'm pretty sure mono is intending to replace parts of itself with coreclr...

thinkpad203• 11 years ago

My understanding was that Mono was the "open source CLR." What parts of Mono would this not cover? Once this project gets ported, what barriers to running .NET code on Linux/Mac/etc with performance and reliability comparable to Windows would remain?

lukasm• 11 years ago

hmm github can't preview cpp files https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr/blob/master/src/gc/gc.cpp

voltagex_• 11 years ago

(Sorry about that, but we can't show files that are this big right now.)

Because it's a gargantuan 1193.581 kb.

andy_ppp• 11 years ago

I think the file is a little too long for github to syntax colour it.

ploxiln• 11 years ago

github suppresses views of syntax-highlighted files that have too many lines or too-long lines. They make browsers crawl or crash (too many elements...) and they're not useful for humans to try to view on a web page anyway.

I guess it's no surprise that microsoft software has a human-edited source file that's over 35000 lines...

larsberg• 11 years ago

I guess it's no surprise that microsoft software has a human-edited source file that's over 35000 lines...

IIRC, it was originally machine-generated... from LISP code written by David Bacon, under contract from the then-GC owner Patrick Dussud.

josh2600• 11 years ago

I made a snapshot of a CentOS 6 box with CoreCLR cloned if anyone wants to play with it: https://www.terminal.com/snapshot/f34341a1b529a9141529cda006...

Note: You'll need a terminal account to boot it, but it only takes 10 seconds to come online once you do that.

bJGVygG7MQVF8c• 11 years ago

test

felixrieseberg• 11 years ago

This post is a few hours old, but I just want to put it out there: We're hiring OPEN SOURCE ENGINEERS. I'm one and our job is awesome[1]. Please get in touch with me if you're interested[2].

[1] http://instagram.com/p/yqQe0bK3Bq/ [2]: felix.rieseberg@microsoft.com

vinceyuan• 11 years ago

Great, but it's too late. .NET will still be the Windows-only technology. (I do know Mono) .NET becomes too big and too complex. I don't think it's easy to make it cross-platform.

NicoJuicy• 11 years ago

This has all been set in motion during Ballmer.. Not from Ballmer himselve, but from inside out ( a lot of good employees there).

Now one of the guys pushing it, is CEO of Microsoft and we are finally seeing a (real) difference.. I joined the MS community a long time ago and this is (again) a heart warming addition!

Good job Microsoft, you're a bit late to the party. But no doubt, the ROI will show sooner or later! ;-)

josteink• 11 years ago

Noteworthy from the source: Microsoft does NOT use (unmergable) SLN-files for their projects, but instead scripts-msbuild invocations against specific projects:

https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr/blob/master/build.cmd#L140

https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr/blob/master/build.cmd#L159

I guess this explains why they saw no need to fix the somewhat broken SLN file-format in the first place, but actually did something about project-files. They don't share their customers pain on this point.

pmelendez2• 11 years ago

As a wild guess I would say that using msbuild-scripts is the way to go if you have automatic builds in place.

Halienja• 11 years ago

So I am not sure what this means to the end user but as another reader pointed out, Google and other companies in future could use .Net/C# as part of their mobile architecture. You could host .net sites on OSX or Linux, test them on a Mac. What else?

camkego• 11 years ago

Mixed mode assemblies on Linux??

Has anyone heard or seen whether MSFT is planning to support this?

CoreCLR is now open source

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