Sunday, April 22, 2012

Rosyln

We saw many improvements, new libraries, new user interfaces in Visual Studio in years. But it is the first time that i heard about a compiler development. Microsoft is working on dynamic compiling technology - called Rosyln.

Current compiler depends on C++ infrastructure. New compiler will allow us to compile the code on .Net framework. I couldn't see any information about the compile time issue. It may be faster or not. But this is not the question yet. There are questions about this technology in my mind. What can we do with Roslyn?
  • First thing is that bringing an idea to me about Visual Studio. Since the new compiler seems to be a service, a Visual Studio version may be just an editor on our computers. We may write code on different editors then check and build our code on the server. This will allow us to write code on the web interface. Even on MAC we will be able to write code. Because the compiler doesn't need to be on our client. Such a this scenario is mostly applicable on the web applications i think.
  • Second thing is the security concerns. When we say dynamic compiling, it includes an input can create an assembly. How will we know someone write some code to run dynamically when we run an applicaiton?  The application can run a code that is saved in a file like this: scriptEngine.ExecuteFile("script.csx");
Microsoft's new technology will bring new and useful features. As far as i know it is published as a CTP release. In the future we will see the real life examples about it.