Tuesday May 23, 2006

Project Semplice - Q&A First of all, thank you for all your comments. Here is a little Q&A based on those comments (from the blog and our demos). Please keep in mind that all answers are subject to change without warning as we are in the very early stages of development.

Q: Are you converting VB source files into Java source files?
No. This is a true VB source to class file compiler. It should be possible though to run a decompiler on the generated class files to convert them into Java source code. But you would loose any comments from your source files that way though.

Q: Isn't it a little bit too late for a VB6 compatible project?
According to our information there are still a lot of companies out there with substantial investments in VB6 code. VB6 was a great programming language for non-professional and casual programmers. VB.Net has a much higher learning curve for these programmers.

Q: Do you have plans to support VB.Net?
We are investigating support for VB.Net. We already added some VB.Net inspired language features such as namespaces and imports as well as single inheritance which we use to better interface with Java applications and class libraries. For the VB6 programmer all these new features are optional. You do not have to use them but may choose to whenever you feel comfortable with them.

Full VB.Net support is difficult to do for various reasons. To pick just a selected few: The generics model for VB.Net is similar to that of C++ where a type instantiation results in the creation of a new type at runtime. Java Generics, on the other hand, are about type reuse. The short story is that type information is checked at compile time. Another problem are delegates (or to call them by a simpler name: function pointers) for which there is also no equivalent in the Java world as of now. And of course there is the ever growing CLR.

How important is VB.Net support for you? Do you just want the language or a subset of it? Do you also want CLR support?

Q: Will there be support for Web Applications?
Tor Norbye showed creating a web application at Graham Hamilton's keynote. We are looking into making it really easy to create Web Applications. But we just started working on this. So, sorry, that I can't give anymore details on this currently.

Q: Will you support the 'Edit&Continue' debugging feature?
Yes, we are planning on.

Q: Is this project Open Source?
This is currently being investigated but no decision has been made.

Q: Is there a time scale on availabilty?
Without any promises: We hope to have some early access available by the end of the year and hopefully be finished for next years JavaOne. But as I said earlier, everything is subject to change...

Please continue to send us your comments, questions and suggestions. Thanks and happy programming!

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