Erlang.NET

[Rick Pettit]

On Wed, Jun 23, 2004 at 10:05:45AM -0500, Eric Newhuis wrote:
> Microsoft Research just announced this.
> 
> No they didn't.  I toy with you.

Hehe.

> But what if that existed?  What would the implications be?

The idea of mixing functional and imperative programming languages is not a
new concept to .NET, as this work has been done with F#.

Non-trivial problems exist when getting lazy and strict languages to 
interoperate. However, it appears as though the work with F# has come a long
way. Cross-language extensions already exist, allowing F# to interoperate
seamlessly with C#, Visual Basic, SML.NET, etc.

The F# compiler is written to allow one to cross-compile a large application
as either OCaml bytecode, OCaml native code, or F# code. This allows
application developers to write some parts of the application as F# code which
makes use of .NET extensions.

F# is essentially a .NET implementation of the core of the OCaml programming
language (with some design changes and extensions) which specify how ML
constructs appear to .NET languages and how to provide access to the .NET
library.

Presumably similar work could be done with core Erlang/OTP to produce, well, E#?

-Rick