Linker for VB?

Hi,

I just read an article written by someone complaining about the lack of a linker for .Net development, and that got me wondering if such a thing was ever developed in order to shrink the run-time and compile statically only the stuff that a given VB program actually uses, rendering distribution of an EXE even easier by not requiring the runtime to be installed.

Thx
Fred.

I very seriously doubt that MS would take that route. That's the entire point of .NET - the framework. It allows you to combine segments of code from virtually any language. I don't see that distribution would be all that difficult, though, when MS allows you to redistribute the framework with your install.

Fisherman >> I don't see that distribution would be all that difficult, though, when MS allows you to redistribute the framework with your install

Joel was actually talking about two things:

- until the .Net framework is available on the great majority of PC's, it'd be cool to be able to static-link his app with just the API's it actually uses instead of redistributing the whole framework

- currently, .Net is still under development, and early adopters are experience issues with incompatibilities. So, the argument that the framework ships with XP doesn't hold, as even those user may already need to update the framework (1.0 -> 1.1, and I assume a 1.2 beta is under development)

So... nobody heard of a linker for VB5 or VB6, making it possible to statically link only those API's that my app actually used, instead of shippping the whole VB runtime?

Thx
Fred.

nope- never heard of it. I think Joel might want to reexamine his argument, however, since the framework is an attempt to further class-orient VB and remove API calls, though, they haven't completed that work yet... so yes, it is still a work in progress. Theoretically, you could run a .NET application on any platform (Linux, UNIX, Mac), so long as the framework is installed. This is not likely to happen, since most Linux and UNIX adminstrators don't want MS products, but oh well. The reason you can't distribute VB apps without either the runtime or framework, however, is that VB compiles programs as an intermediate language - in fact, in .NET, all languages compile to "Microsoft Intermediate Language" (MSIL), which is how you get the Common Language Runtime - so that C++, COBOL, C#, VB, JScript, and PERL code all runs on the same platform, against the framework, and with the same level of performance. In VB6, the Ruby engine was included with the runtime to compile the intermediate code to machine native at run. It's always been a complaint with "open" programmers that Microsoft does this, and until .NET, I would have agreed. But I think the benefits of being able to develop in so many languages with very, very close levels of efficiency in .NET far outweigh the costs of distributing the framework.

I'm agreed with Fisherman...