I can still remember last year when I attended the MVP Summit 2013 an awesome talk by the Visual C++ team around “CLR team working closely with Visual C++ team to improve performance of .NET apps as well as making .NET available for every device”. Unfortunately, I could not disclose that information because it was under NDA but Microsoft has made it public at /Build 2014 so I can freely blog about it now.
At the very beginning, I thought about going native not the conference though, but being able for .NET to emit native code which is compiled into C++ binaries (that was my assumption), and it makes me very happy to know that my assumption was spot on.
As many developers are aware (even the .NET dudes) C++ is an awesome, cross-platform and high performing language which can target any device, this is specially important these days when mobility and cloud have changed the computing paradigm. Managed languages are not as efficient as native, mainly because the consume more power, this is mainly related to all of the goodness they provide developers (memory allocation & de-allocation among others).
The creator of C++ Bjarne Stroustrup has a cool video on Youtube about “How C++ Combats global warming”
.NET Native is currently in developer preview, more resources and video below
- http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/vstudio/dotnetnative
- http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dotnet/archive/2014/04/03/the-next-generation-of-net.aspx
- http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dotnet/archive/2014/04/02/announcing-net-native-preview.aspx
Regards,
Angel