Comment by MichaelGG | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MichaelGG | Hacker News Reader

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".NET applications only run (officially)" -- what's that even mean? I can rephrase it: "Mono applications only run (unofficially) on Microsoft's CLR".

The actual runtime is an ECMA spec (which has been unchanged since v2, as all MS has added since are implementation changes and more libraries). C# and the core parts of the runtime are under Microsoft's Community promise[1]. But you're right that MS could try to assert copyright over parts of the extended APIs, and some companies might be worried about that. OTOH the Oracle versus Google thing should alleviate a lot of concerns.

As far as F#, it's quite a bit more than a few small changes.

1: Writeup by Xamarin here: http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2009/Jul-06.html

> ".NET applications only run (officially)" -- what's that even mean?

If MS feels threatened by Mono, it changes its runtime and kills interoperability. From that point on, Mono is playing catch-up and who knows what happens to the users caught in the middle.

That's one of the least-plausible Microsoft trickery ideas I've heard of. Anything that makes Mono play catch-up also hurts every existing .NET program.

Even if they had some magical changes that kills interop (like, what, I don't know), Mono still works with all current apps at that point, and only developers adopting the new, not-compatible system (and thus discarding all their old libraries) would be affected.

Microsoft sorta has done this, with Silverlight and WinRT. They required different stdlibs and a bit of runtime tweaking, as I understand. Silverlight was handled by Mono, and WinRT - not sure if anyone is interested, as it's really for Windows Metro applications.

What kind of change could Microsoft make to their runtime to "kill interoperability" with Mono without affecting backwards compatibility for everyone else using .NET?

There are enough people (especially enterprises, their most important customers) using .NET now that Microsoft has to be very careful about any changes they do make to avoid breaking existing applications and upsetting their paying customers.

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