.NET Compiler Platform ("Roslyn")

Roslyn (.NET compilers as services) now open source

The greatest announcement for developers of Visual Studio extensions in the past days has been about Roslyn, the .NET compiler platform that will allow you to use the compilers as services, and that will be open source.

Even in closed form Roslyn would be great, because the current automation code model (EnvDTE.Project.CodeModel, EnvDTE.ProjectItem.FileCodeModel), apart from being entirely missing for some .NET languages such as F#:

  • It is very limited, either to get information or to emit code.
  • It has lots of bugs that I have reported on Microsoft Connect (see the “BUG” articles in the “Articles about the code model” section of my web site)
  • Microsoft decided not to improve it long time ago (and not to fix bugs, either).
  • Being native (not managed) can cause OutOfMemoryException due to memory fragmentation.

None of those things will happen with Roslyn for C# and VB.NET (other languages will have to wait, though), because they will be the compilers used by Visual Studio (starting with VS 2013 if you want) for those languages and Microsoft is changing Visual Studio to use only the public APIs of the parsers/compilers/etc. that will be available for Visual Studio extensions. So, any problem / limitation with the compilers and your extension is a problem for Visual Studio too.

And as if that was not enough, you can have the source code too!

Now, this raises some questions also for developer of Visual Studio extensions:

  • What to do with other languages apart from C# and .NET if your extension supports them (not the case of my MZ-Tools add-in)
  • Since Roslyn will be available for VS 2013 and higher, what to do if an extension has to support older versions (VS 2010, 2012 at least)…
  • What to do if you have a huge investment in the previous technologies (automation code model or your own parsers). For example, ReSharper has decided not to use Roslyn…

And of course, the next thing that would most benefit developers of Visual Studio extensions is to open the Visual Studio assemblies. I don’t mean to “open source” but simply “reference source” (like the .NET Framework Reference Source) and “step source” (like .NET Framework Step Source) would be huge. Since opening the .NET compilers has taken years for Microsoft, I guess that we will have to wait, but I hope…