C# 5.0 – Other News

Compiler as a Service

In the last 10 minutes of his talk on the future of C# 5.0, Anders Hejlsberg gave an update on a project that he first mentioned back at PDC 2008 – Compiler as a Service [watch]. Anders confirmed that what was a prototype back in 2008 is now being worked on in earnest. It has a codename – “Roslyn” (he didn’t actually say this, but you’ll see it appear as a namespace in the code samples, and in one of the Visual Studio tabs), but no ship dates as yet.

As Anders put it, during the compilation process, the compiler builds up a huge amount of knowledge about what your code actually means – and then throws it all away. The idea of Compiler as a Service is give you a Language Object Model encapsulating exactly the same knowledge about your code as the compiler has - right down to the finest semantic details like what an identifier means in a particular context, or precisely how a method call will bind at run time.

It seems that this Language Object Model will be available in a number of different ways, including to Visual Studio Extensions, which will be able to use it for things like performing Refactorings, or formatting code intelligently.

Anders showed one example of a Visual Studio Extension that could add outline regions to if/else blocks [watch]. Sadly, the extension failed to run in Anders demo, but it still conveyed the simplicity and power of the Language Object Model.In another example he showed how the Language Object Models for VB.Net and C# could be used together to create a Visual Studio extension allowing you to copy C# code and paste it as VB.Net [watch]. “I’m not saying this is super-trivial”, remarked Anders, “I mean, there is a couple of thousand lines of code here. But it’s not a complete compiler at all – it’s relatively modest.”

There is more to come

In answer to a question at the end of the session [watch], Anders confirmed that there will be other features added to C# 5.0 that they’re not ready to talk about yet. He did hint that the kind of areas they are exploring were Immutability, Isolated State and Pure Functions – all features associated with ensuring that programs continue to work correctly when parallelism is introduced. Check out the Programming Languages Panel session if you want to hear Anders talk in a little more detail about this.