A big selling point in the initial marketing of the .Net platform was that it was supposed to enable code written in different language to interoperate smoothly. I always looked at that claim with a fair amount of suspicion, probably since I remember what it was like to develop classic ASP with Perl. If you remember, ASP was supposed to be usable with any language that supported Active Scripting, and ActiveState brought out a Win32 version of Perl that did. However, I never got it to run as smoothly as with VBScript (If I recall correctly, I had the most problems with getting ADO calls to work right), and since it was a ”unsupported” language, I couldn’t find much help on the net. I was hoping that this time around, Microsoft would try harder to make programming in third-party languages a reality.
Now, while the CLR is designed to run IL code which is language-agnostic in theory, it’s seems obvious to me that the CTS was designed for imperative, object oriented language with strong(-ish) typing, and in particular the C# language. It do not lend itself readily to typeless,dynamic, functional and/or logical languages. Articles like ”Dynamic languages and virtual machines” by Jon Udell and ”Ignoring the Scripts” by Larry O’Brien state that noone is using dynamic languages on the .Net platform to any large degree.
However, while I was researching Smalltalk for the IDG.se column, I stumbled across #Smalltalk that seem to be a fairly useful Smalltalk implementation that compiles to IL code. Also of interest is S#.Net, a dialect of Smalltalk-98 that also runs on the CLR.
Some of the other languages that have been made to run on the CLR are:
- Python, in the form of IronPython.
- Standard ML, in the form of SML.NET.
- Mercury, a logical language in the tradition of Prolog, in the form of Mercury.NET.
- Lisp and Scheme, in the form of dotlisp and Dot-Scheme.
All these languages are pretty far from being strongly-typed imperative languages, so it seems that it is indeed possible to use more dynamic languages on the .Net platform. Indeed, Jim Hugunin, the author of IronPython (and Jython, the Python-on-JVM implementation) notes that while his initial intention was to write an article titled ”Why .NET is a terrible platform for dynamic languages”, he ended up with the conclusion that the CLR is indeed a good platform for dynamic languages. My question is: Is anyone using these languages on the .Net platform in real projects? I’d be very interested to hear any success stories.
