Wednesday 20 July 2011

Microsoft's 'Roslyn' compiler as a service project

Microsoft plans to share more information on its "Roslyn" compiler-as-a-service (CaaS) project during its annual Microsoft Research Faculty Summit this week. 

Roslyn, at a high level, is Microsoft's vehicle for "taking .Net to the cloud." Microsoft's stated goal with Roslyn is to "build a compiler architecture that is amenable to use as a foundation for modern tools." 

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/… 

You can do all sorts of fancy tricks with the compiler pipeline, like automatic parallelization for example. 

I forsee compiler add-in companies sprouting up all over the place now. Development teams will have to agree on what add-ins to use, possibly even the ordering of the add-ins, so that the exe's match. Build-servers will have to include this technology, unless you can config the compiler+addins outside of FinalBuilder. 
Overall I see this is as a good thing, a bit like Firefox+add-ins. But I fear there will be only a few real gems, and a ton of dross out there