Shouldn't GNOME libraries be portable?

Shouldn't GNOME libraries be portable?

Posted Mar 26, 2004 7:50 UTC (Fri) by skybrian (subscriber, #365)
Parent article: GNOME Platform Stormclouds

I'm not a GNOME developer, but it seems to me that to be consistent with GNOME's goal of
portability, it should be possible to compile GNOME libraries to both Java .jar files and C#
assemblies. Just like Linux and the base GNOME libraries are portable to any reasonable real
machine, managed GNOME libraries should be portable to any reasonable virtual machine. Let
the end-users decide which virtual machine they want to run. Eventually the Parrot developers
might want to run these libraries too.

How could it be done? Since Java bytecodes are pretty much a subset of C# bytecodes, the
source language probably would look more like Java. But it would have to be a strictly defined
subset of both Java and C#. It would be best if there were a compiler specifically designed to
target multiple VM's and flag non-portable output, sort of a gcc for virtual machines.

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