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| Open sourcing Dotnet |
Microsoft
signalled a major departure from its long-held positions when it open
sourced the base of .NET, its execution engine CoreCLR. It isn’t
that Microsoft hasn’t opened up before, having already released the
core libraries, but to open source .NET Core is ‘some’ shift.
CoreCLR, that performs functions such as garbage
collection and compilation to machine code, can servce as a base
stack for a range of scenarios from console utilities to the cloud.
Microsoft
has released the complete and up-to-date CoreCLR implementation,
which includes .NET GC, RyuJIT, native interop and many other .NET
runtime components on GitHub. The free code will run not only on
computer servers that use Windows,
but also machines equipped with Linux or Mac, Microsoft’s two main
operating system rivals. This outcome can be construed as a
realisation that Microsoft has come around to the reality that it
needs to recognise the sizeable presence of its competitors in the
market. As we know, .NET core would be the foundation of all future
.NET releases.
Microsoft
wanted to open up the code first as it wanted developers to feel the
cross-platform experience with the Core CLR Repo showing up on a
daily basis, similar to Core FX. For almost a decade now, Opensource
has been the way the world builds and runs software, but why exactly
is Microsoft wanting to make .NET open now? The answer is actually
quite simple. Today, people who use .NET are actually stuck on a
platform with a server environment that is deficient to Linux. So the
only way to expand Microsoft’s development tools was to go
opensource. The company already took its baby steps when it offered
free versions of its
Office
applications for Apple iPhones and iPads,
obviously to catch up with Android.
Looking
purely at size, the coreCLR repo has about 2.6 million lines of code
of c++ and c# and the JIT close to 360K lines. Well that means that
when .NET Core will be fully available on GitHub, together the repos
will definitely exceed 5 million lines of code. But the Opensource
story will be complete only with Microsoft’s next version of
Windows for computer servers that will run Docker, a Linux product.
Are you eager to learn more about Dotnet ? Here you go : Why .net may be just the right thing for you
