I just wanted everyone here to know about this .. we're tackling .NET in a positive way as well ... It's a frontline battle with .NET .... We've reached a position where gcc can get the whole build system up .. with that we've touched the 500,000 line mark as well ... (half a million !).

Finally after months of hardwork and lots of coffee, the DotGNU Portable.Net team have finally got to building their libraries on any platform they choose to .. The so called "team" consists of lots of people , many of whom are coincidentially named "Rhys Weatherly" . The compiler is not really a compiler but more of a compiler shell ... So what we're really announcing is that our C# frontend and IL backend are working well with each other .. We're still playing around with JVM backends and planning a Parrot (of perl6 fame) backend.

And maybe if you want your favourite language X to be supported , you could always write your own frontend (provided you are a CS student with a copy of the dragon book & lots of free time, like yours truly) . The runtime is such a similar flexible machinery which currently has only an IL frontend , but well we could always add more ...

Now that we've got the distractions out of the way , let me tell you what's so special about this release. The C# compiler frontend is 95% of the way , written in C and very fast too . So you could say we're finally free of any dependency on ANY NON FREE TOOL . The runtime engine is also fast and can be trimmed to operate in low memory conditions (as low as 2 MB) ...

Get the debian packages from

ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/dotgnu-pnet/debian/

We have finally arrived as 100% free software ... we can build the entire system with just the basic GNU tools and the release tarballs ...

Hoping that everyone understands why we have to keep MS honest about C# and .NET ... Just hating its guts does not help too much to further GNU ... Help us make DotGNU bigger, better and free !

It's had contributers from a number of students in India ... (eg , one IISc guy is trying to port to IA-64) ... We're currently operating with 0 funding and volunteer contributions ... please lend a hand if you can. Code contributions or packaging or testing is appreciated ... demo'ing it at the LUGs is even more appreciated !..

Gopal