[Fsf-friends] Announcing DotGNU Portable.Net 0.4.8

[Gopal V]

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
-- 
The difference between insanity and genius is measured by success