Lang.NET 2006
Sunday, August 6th, 2006 at 2:21 PM by: babbagelindenI’ve just got back to Nottingham after spending last week in Redmond for the Lang.NET 2006 symposium, a forum for discussion on programming languages, managed execution environments, compilers, multi-language libraries, and integrated development environments.
Lots of fascinating work was presented, but the highlights for me were Anders Hejlsberg’s talk on LINQ (Language INtegrated Query), Mike Barnett’s talk on Spec# and Don Syme’s talk on F#. With languages as varied as F#, IronPython and PowerShell now being developed the Common Language Runtime finally seems to be living up to its name.
It was also great to be able to talk to Miguel de Icaza about integrating Mono in to Second Life. Miguel was great fun to hang out with: after hearing a torrent of Microsoft codenames on day one of the conference, he decided on the spot to give codenames to the various releases of Mono. We’re currently on Mono “T-Bone” and have Mono “Rump Steak” and “Sirloin” to look forward to.
Cory and I presented Second Life and our work integrating Mono at the start of day three. Cory’s introduction to SL did a great job of convincing people who had heard of Second Life that they should take a closer look. John Lam, who is doing really interesting work with RubyCLR is now looking in to running RubyConf as a mixed reality event in Second Life. John was also great fun to hang out with and did a great job as resident photo journalist.
I was initially concerned that the collection of hacks I presented for embedding Mono in SL might appall people, but the consensus seemed to be that they were neat hacks and they generated a lot of discussion about potential future enhancements to the CLR. A lot of discussion at the conference was about supporting dynamic languages like Ruby which, like Second Life, would benefit immensely from support for continuations in the CLI. Hopefully we’ll see them in the future.
The talk went down so well that Thottam Sriram, who did a great job organizing the symposium, asked me to repeat it on Friday for the CLR team at Microsoft. The repeat talk was also well received and generated another collection of tips for integrating the CLR based on their recent experiences with the CLR integration with SQL server.
Overall it was a really interesting and worthwhile visit. There are lots of cool things happening in the CLI space and it was great to make contact with lots of people who will be able to help out with our efforts to integrate Mono in to Second Life. For more details on the conference, see the .NET Languages Blog.
August 6th, 2006 at 6:30 PM
I did a double-take when I saw this in my RSS reader at first; I thought my Second Life Blog and Lambda the Ultimate feeds had gotten mixed up! It’s great to hear that you’re making headway on the Mono front. Are the slides from your talk available online anywhere?
August 7th, 2006 at 2:44 AM
[...] Jim Purbrick writes to the Second Life blog, …Cory and I presented Second Life and our work integrating Mono at the start of day three. Cory’s introduction to SL did a great job of convincing people who had heard of Second Life that they should take a closer look. John Lam, who is doing really interesting work with RubyCLR is now looking in to running RubyConf as a mixed reality event in Second Life. John was also great fun to hang out with and did a great job as resident photo journalist. [...]
August 7th, 2006 at 6:53 AM
I blogged about this but my trackbacks are broken.. Anyway ;0 I’m following the Mono development quite closely to the point of stalking you across the net
August 7th, 2006 at 7:42 AM
[...] From a post by Babbage Linden on the Second Life Blog he talks about his side of the meeting with John Lam about whom I talked in my previous post. Apparently he now is looking into doing the next RubyConf as mixed media event in Second Life (I should propose that to the EuroPython or Plone Conference guys, too). [...]
August 7th, 2006 at 7:53 AM
Hey, I posted a note about using IronPython in the context of Second Life over on my sldevelopers.com blog. How about it? Any possibility that eventually there might be a RubyCLR or IronPython way to manipulate Second Life things in world or even (woo) out world?
August 7th, 2006 at 9:49 AM
[...] Babbage Linden provides a personal update to what took place there. If you are in to the techi, why not go checki? [...]
August 7th, 2006 at 11:03 AM
I know this is off-topic, but since this seems to be the first post since the Creation Engine got mothballed, I was wondering if there was a way to get an RSS feed just for your stuff. I can only find the comprehensive one for all SL stuff.
August 8th, 2006 at 6:37 AM
WordPress allows you to get a feed from author pages..
Babbage’s posts can be found at http://blog.secondlife.com/author/babbage/
The feed for his posts are here http://blog.secondlife.com/author/babbage/feed/
You can append /feed/ to any othe the author pages or category pages. The tags are a plugin, so the feeds are not available.
September 13th, 2006 at 7:04 PM
so will we be seeing mono or some other CLR running in SL at any point in the near future to replace LSL ?
September 27th, 2006 at 5:07 AM
I was just perusing the Mono FAQ, and it appears that no interpreters exist for Win OSs on AMD processors. Will implementing Mono impact SL users w/AMD processors? (Sorry, I have about a quarter of a clue.)
October 26th, 2006 at 2:41 PM
[...] My feeling iswas this: Ruby has helped push the importance of closures, the next step is continuations. So much for that. I’m guessing we’ll all end up spending a lot of time writing custom libraries for packaging up program state to ship among processors like the Second Life guys have had to do. Irrational optimism: Ruby 2.1 will bring continuations back because the CLR and JVM will have them by that time! [...]
April 17th, 2007 at 12:30 AM
[...] in August when we gave the Lang.Net demo I noticed that the simulator memory usage was steadily growing over time while running Mono [...]