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by jevinskie 4453 days ago
Could you ask around the office and find out some of the details about the C# bootstrap process? I would be fascinated to know what language the non-C# compiler was written in and also how long they used/improved the non-C# compiler until they switched to the C# compiler.

This source release is so cool!
1 comments
Locke1689 4453 days ago
Oh, the old compiler is just the currently shipping compiler (i.e., the one in a clean install of VS 2013). We've been using and maintaining it since the beginning. It's written in C++, so we refer to it as the "native compiler."

We only stopped bootstrapping using the native compiler about, oh, 6 months ago, since that was when we decided to take a dependency on new language features. The next VS will be the first VS where Roslyn is the default C# compiler.

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jevinskie 4452 days ago
Oh I see, I didn't realize the native compiler was being used the whole time. Thank you for the insight!
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