_xxx_ said:
I think it's more because of the awful performance of .NET. Too slow for the OS itself.
You say this from experience I wonder?
Having been using .net since early betas of 1, I've had a number of situations where I've ported my C# app to C++ out of interest (or the other way round). Usually, they come out with approximatly equal performance, however, a couple of the apps came out noticably faster in C#, while one came out noticably slower in C# (about 20% - a linear time ray tracer). It all comes down to optimising for the system. In C# you need to be careful to not invoke Gen1+ garbage collection, if you do get Gen1+ even on very small amounts of data, you can get very significant performance hits. This is not a fault of .net, although it will naturally improve with time (and multi-core) it's simply a design pattern for the language. Just like in C++ how you avoid excessive use of templates.
Overall it's just common sense, .net 2.0 was within 10% performance of C++ (VS 2003) in the last statistical benchmarking I read. Thats old. .net 2.0 is out after all. Heck it was faster in a few cases too.
Who would really care about 10%? speed these days is algorithm and cache usage. Absolutly simple changes can be almost orders of magnitude now days.
There are other significant performance advantages. One example would be managed directX, in theory using managed directX may be significantly faster than unmanaged directX as much of the the overhead of COM can be bypassed (at least in theory). Not that it really matters in DX that much anyway, as providing you are competent then you will be gpu limited anyway.
That said, I don't believe the article includes C++/Cli assemblies, which I'd expect are quite common in vista. Visual studio, for example, makes quite heavy use of .net, yet is written off in a single sentance.
Frankly, the benifits of a managed language are quite enormous (security, reflection, etc etc). I aggree totally with what killer says on this.
Also remember that .net MSIL code (the code that gets written to assemblies) is very highly optimised before being written, so the runtime compiling is mostly just converting to the current architecture than actually compiling. This is where the advantages really come in, my .net apps fully support and take advantage of x64 for example, and I didn't have to do a thing.
What about in 5 years,? will we still be using x86?
Microsoft do have the 'singulartiy' research project going on, this is a brand new, *totally* managed code operating system. It's quite interesting. Needless to say it's not going to replace windows any day soon, but the possibilities for smaler scale systems are quite awesome.
