Jason Whittington quoted this: *Matt Gripes wrote I'm glad Ximian wrote a C# port to linux, but, at the end of the day, is .NET going to be a uni-platform technology? * [Thinking In .NET]
And then Jason added: This problem is one I've been thinking about a lot lately....The real question in my mind is how Microsoft is going to treat the ECMA specification....Library support on different platforms is sure to vary week-to-week, so let's discount those for a second and concentrate on the fundamentals of the runtime.... [More]
While I share Jason's interest in whether Microsoft will "play fair" by the standards process, I think that library standardization is the driver of cross-platform deployments (I'm thinking about the history of C/C++). I never agreed with Sun's contention that programmers would be "tricked" into platform-specifics by typing "//\@Import Win32.dll" (or whatever the exact syntax was), but with C# there is no tool that tells you "This code uses only ECMA standard classes and local assemblies." Without that... Wait a second... Geez, that'd be a useful tool to write...