Finding.Net Core initiatives?

Question

After reading about the end of scala.net I wondered where I can find out about .Net Core initiatives. Whether it is new languages, frameworks, tools, utilities. Anything really! Just I read about new ideas based on JVM and wondered where I can follow .Net Core developments by people other than Microsoft.

Answer 1

there is not the interest in building languages for .net core as there there is for JVM. At one time MS created IronPython and IronRuby but lost interested and open sourced them. Only IronPython has beed maintained.

also unlike JVM (which is very stable), MS has decided the .net core runtime will be upgraded with every release, along with C# features. This makes other languages support hard. even the VB.Net language group is unable to keep up. the F# group seems to do better.

as the runtime is open source you can follow their roadmap:

https://themesof.net/roadmap?product=.NET&release=8.0

the other complexity is that MS uses the roslyn compiler tools:

https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn

while most new language projects use the LLVM compiler project. this makes these projects hard to port to the .net runtime.

https://llvm.org

for example WASM support is LLVM based. For c# to support WASM was difficult. Originally there was a c# to c to clang to wasm compiler chain. this was not practical, so the next effort was a WASM app that was a .net runtime that could host .net dlls. the first cut used the mono runtime which was written in gcc C/C++. first they ported from mono's gcc to clang/llvm. then could build a WASM .net runtime.

the AOT effort has run into the same issue (LLVM support). they use clan/llvm to build the .net core runtime.

and finally there is a version of the .net runtime completely written in javascript. this allows any javascript environment to run .net programs:

https://github.com/Elringus/DotNetJS