C# and Silverlight

InfoQ is reporting that:

"First of all, C# won't be fully supported in Silverlight. Unlike VB, Python, Ruby, and JavaScript, C# does not support the Dynamic Language Runtime and cannot be hosted for runtime compilation in Silverlight."

This is a bit of a stretch. What happens is that Silverlight will ship with compiler/interpreters that can compile source code written in Javascript, Python, Ruby and Visual Basic to native code.

But Silverlight will not include a C# compiler on the client side. You will still be able to author libraries and assemblies with C# and write your application with it, you just wont be able to dump a C# source file over the network and expect that to be compiled and ran on the client machine.

That being said, Mono does have a C# compiler written in C# and we could ship that compiler, and people could use this as a dependency if they wanted to.

Now, what would be an adorable hack would be to relicense Mono's C# compiler commercially to Microsoft and have them distribute it for Silverlight ;-)

Thanks to some fine contributions, Mono's C# 3.0 compiler is in great shape (missing some things, but they will be done in no time).