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Comment by bru | Hacker News Reader

> Microsoft acquired Mojang for a smooth 2.5 BILLION dollars.

Impressive.

I hope that Microsoft won't disrupt Minecraft's development (e.g. like they did with Skype, making Linux a third-rate platform - which should not happen since Minecraft's coded in Java).

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One would hope that their recent "open" nature to things like the .NET compiler and parts of the .NET source will rub off on the arm that will control Minecraft/Mojang. I find it hard to believe that they'd fail to recognize the impact of being on multiple platforms. But, Skype is a recent example of failing to realize the importance of platform agnostic software.

Wasn't the problem with Skype (at least in part) that they bought a hollow shell and not the underlying technology?

Not at all. They did get all of Skype's assets, but they modified the technology significantly to comply with NSA spying desires, as well as port the back-end from PostgreSQL to SQL Server. It was not a quick surgery, and now Skype is a regular old crappy MS product.

I mean, Skype works just as well as it ever did on PC.

I'm curious: on the Mac, Skype went through a major regression in terms of usability from 3? to 4? (I forget exactly which major version change it was; I do know that 6.xx is not significantly different from the version everyone I know avoided upgrading to until they were forced) -- did this not also happen on Windows?

I'm just waiting for them to announce a rewrite in C#.

Given how similar the two languages are, I wonder how hard it would be to automate such a translation?

Many lines would need nothing. Overarching structure, idiomatic usage, and lack of benefits from being able to use language constructs of efficiency in C# would yield sub-optimal results.

Manual conversion to idiomatic C# would be a better route and add the benefits of deeper familiarity with the application. It's one thing to wrestle with a new codebase. It's another thing to try to make sense of something transcoded by a tool. Was the original coder insane or is it just an edge case in your translation tool?

You don't even have to translate anything. Bytecode translation via IKVM.NET[1] to run JVM applications on the .NET runtime works surprisingly well.

[1] http://www.ikvm.net/

On a language level, not that hard (though the result wouldn't be idiomatic in a lot of places). But on a library and API level ... Either you move everything that uses the stdlib to your own standard library excerpt that you maintain for both languages to be identical. Or you find compatible implementations in the other language (or translate Apache Harmony to C# as well). Or you'll deal with all the things that your program could call and emit code that does the same thing in the target language, with more code where standard library functionality differs slightly.

And then there is the problem of external libraries and their APIs. Either translate them as well, or find API-compatible replacements, or find replacements and handle the API differences yourself.

Actually, it comes down to the same thing either way, when considering the standard library just as a library, among the others.

You might be interested to know about ngit. It's a c# git library under the mono project: https://github.com/mono/ngit . The thing is they created a tool called sharpen so they could convert most of the jgit code over to c# :)

And a web version in JScript.

That would mean 2 things: 1 - They stop supporting everything except Windows and XBox 2 - They need to buy Xamarin too in order to keep supporting all platforms.

#stopspeculation :)

You forgot about the almost dozen people that use the Windows Phone platform that they'll port Minecraft for and support.

They will most likely rewrite it to C#. C# games run perfectly fine on Linux.

Why would they do that?

Because the original codebase is Java and that's the dirtiest of words around Microsoft.

Only the PC version is in Java. The other versions are in C++.

My Mac seems to disagree with you on that.

The Windows, Mac and Linux are the same version.

Your "Mac" is a PC.

I think I disagree with you on that.

You know, on principle.

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