Mono and C# 3.0

Since a few folks have asked on irc and they are not using my innovative comment-reading service, am reposting (with some slight edits and clarifications) the answer to "Will Mono implement C# 3.0?"

Yes, we will be implementing C# 3.0.

We have been waiting for two reasons: first, we wanted to focus on bug fixing the existing compilers to ensure that we have a solid foundation to build upon. I very much like the Joel Test that states `Do you fix bugs before writing new code?'.

C# 3.0 is made up of about a dozen new small features. The features are very easy to implement but they rely heavily on the 2.0 foundation: iterators, anonymous methods, variable lifting and generics.

Since we have been fixing and improving the 2.0 compiler anyways, we get to implement the next draft of the specification instead of the current draft. This means that there is less code to rewrite when and if things change.

Fixing bugs first turned out to be a really important. In C# 3.0 lambda functions are built on the foundation laid out by anonymous methods. And it turned out that our anonymous method implementation even a few months ago had some very bad bugs on it. It took Martin Baulig a few months to completely fix it. I wrote about Martin's work here. The second piece is LINQ, some bits and pieces of the libraries have been implemented, those live in our Olive subproject. Alejandro Serrano and Marek Safar have contributed the core to the Query space, and Atsushi did some of the work on the XML Query libraries. We certainly could use help and contributions in that area.

Anecdote: we started on the C# 2.0 compiler about six months before C# 2.0 was actually announced at the 2003 PDC. Through ECMA we had early access to the virtual machine changes to support generics, and the language changes to C#. By the time of the PDC we had almost a functional generics compiler.

The spec was not set in stone, and it would change in subtle places for the next two years. So during the next two years we worked on and off in completing the support and implementing the changes to the language as it happened.

Most of the hard test cases came when C# 2.0 was released to the public as part of .NET 2.0. About six weeks into the release (mid-December and January) we started receiving a lot of bug reports from people that were using the new features.

Second Mini-Anecdote: Pretty much every new release of IronPython has exposed limitations in our runtime, our class libraries or our compilers. IronPython has really helped Mono become a better runtime.