Re: What is the benefit to me of .NET as an end-user?

Jim Cooper wrote:

If you want to argue that eventually all things are the same because
the hardware only knows its own machine code, then this discussion is
pointless.

I don't want to argue. I want to understand why .NET would not be
considered a VM when Java is. Nothing you have said distinguishes the
two.

Assuming your platform is Windows :-) .NET was never intended as a
cross-platform environment.

Define Windows. Even in Windows, there are multiple platforms. Win32
vs Win CE (a subset of Win32). If .NET was never intended as a
cross-platform environment, why was Compact Framework released with
..NET 1.0?

Also, most would consider the browser a different platform than Win32,
which is the point of ASP.NET.

This is one reason I think platform a vague word. .NET (or Java)
being a platform, is obviously not the same as Windows (or Linux)
being a platform. It's a vague word with dubious connotations, IMO.

Agreed again.

OK then. Why isn't Delphi a VM? You take Pascal code, and the Delphi
compiler converts it to native machine instructions. Delphi provides
an API that gets called. What's different?

What is different is that when I build my Win32 application with
Delphi, what exists is an application that contains native x86
instructions. I can deploy this application to anyone running Windows
on their desktop and they can execute it. This is because the
application only contains native x86 instructions, no immediate
language or byte code that has to be compiled/converted/interpreted
first.

IL is never executed by anything - it is merely a programming
language that gets compiled. .NET (normally) has two compile cycles,
that's all.

I would speculate the same is true for Java byte code. The main
difference, as I understand it, is the caching of previously "compiled"
IL code.

--
Jon Robertson
Borland Certified Advanced Delphi 7 Developer
MedEvolve, Inc
http://www.medevolve.com
.

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