Managed Space

Managed Space : Jason Whittington's Radio Weblog

Updated: 3/26/2003; 9:20:48 AM.

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Wednesday, January 22, 2003

Component Software
beyond Object-Oriented Programming

So I'm teaching a class at some little company this week with Ted Neward. Ted is dragging around a copy of the second edition of Clemens Szyperski's book and I flipped through it tonight while drinking beers with him and Peter. I never really read Clemens on the first go-round but the second edition definitely rocks. Coverage of COM, Corba, Java, XML, and .NET. After a few minutes alone with this book I found myself strangely aroused...(sorry, I guess I've been reading too much chiara lately :) I think if you only absorb one techical book in 2003 you'd be hard-pressed to pick a better one.

1:16:53 AM comment []

Searching for the Zen of managed code
The past few weeks have been really busy for me. It seems like I have more things that I want to do than can begin to have time for. Common problem I guess :)

I shipped the March "Managed Space" column for .NET Developers Journal yesterday. It was one of the hardest pieces I've written relative to the word count but I think it turned out well. Along the way I spent a lot of time thinking about what a managed platform should really do - my views of the CLI have changed quite a bit as a result. To get some idea of what I've been thinking here are some papers I read recently:

K John Gough, Stacking them up: A Comparison of Virtual Machines
This is one of the original papers outlining some of the differences between Java and .NET. Short and not too deep, it's a good overview. Dr. Gough has some nice stuff on his web site too.

Erik Meijer, Scripting .NET using Mondrian
Interesting look at implementing a functional scripting language on the CLR.

Erik Meijer and John Gough: A Technical Overview of the Common Language Infrastructure
Similar content to the first paper, but much longer and deeper. (heh-heh, uhhh, Butthead you should have heard what you just said!)

Stephen Gilmore: Resource-Bounded functional programming on the JVM and .NET
Nice paper, with a really succinct summary of the difference between the two environments:
- The JVM is an object-oriented execution environment for any language so long as it's Java.
- The .NET platform is an object-oriented execution for any environment so long as it isn't Java.

Nicely said. Any questions?

David Hanson, lcc.net: Targeting the .NET Common Intermediate Language from Standard C
I downloaded this compiler and played with it. It's a mixed-mode compiler similar to Managed C++.

Karine Arnout, Eiffel for .NET: An Introduction
The Eiffel compiler and lcc.net have opposite philosophies. lcc.net (and MC++) use unmanaged types and code to represent things that don't map to the CLI's type system (CTS or Common Type System). Eiffel.NET chooses to map Eiffel classes to .NET in a on-to-many fashion to implement multiple inheritance.

As happy as I am at having a print outlet for "Managed Space" I am impatient to see it go out - it would be so much easier to post it here in real-time :) The publisher doesn't seem to want to post the content freely to the web, so I will probably post pieces on this site after they've had their run in the magazine.

1:01:30 AM comment []