Re: 1 day?

[Matt Hargett <matt () use net>]

Dave Aitel wrote:
> This is a pretty interesting article on .Net. The surprising thing for
> me was how quickly (1 day) they were able to port Quake II's C++ code to
> managed C++ code. I'm not sure yet how managed this code actually is -
> do they have overflow protection and memory management? They can
> definitely inter-operate between .Net classes and the C++ stuff.
> Anyways. It's interesting.
>
> http://www.vertigosoftware.com/Quake2NETDownloads/Quake%20II%20NET%20Port%20Whitepaper.pdf

In .NET, you can have "mixed mode" assemblies that contain voth CIL and 
native machine code. When you flip the configuration flag for a C++ 
project to "managed", the compiler figures out what can be 
deterministically put into CIL and what can't. The blocks that can't are 
marked as "unsafe". They call this "IJW" ("it Just Works"). It's pretty 
neat. One of the nifty things they are doing in the new MC++ is that 
many more C++ constrcts will compile down to "safe" CIL. Like you see in 
the paper, once the C++ is compiled as managed, it's accessible from 
other managed languages. So while Quake II's source is "C++" (C without 
globals), and is compiled as managed C++, the little radar "applet" 
(pardon my use of the word) is C#. There's also only a 15% performance 
hit in my tests with freesci and other things.

What you don't get for free is garbage collection -- you only get that 
for managed types (types marked with a ^ in MC++ 2.0). For those of you 
who haven't seen the new MC++ stuff, it's pretty neat. The original MC++ 
was a retarded joke -- it was pretty much an unusable syntax.

This Quake II MC++ demo is about 2 years old, btw.
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