One Runtime to Bind Them All

Microsoft is positioning certain aspects of the .NET initiative as much more flexible and unconstrained than Java/J2EE, the main competition. However, in One Runtime to Bind Them All, Osvaldo Pinali Doederlein and the Java Lobby post a detailed rejoinder to what looks more and more like a marketing-only feature, the ability of the Common Language Runtime to support many different programming languages. But, and this is a big but, only of the language is modified to in some very restrictive ways. C++ and Eiffel, for example, support multiple inheritance but the CLR does not so the .NET versions of these languages, Managed C++ and Eiffel#, don’t either. So much for out of the box compatibility with existing code bases. Anyway, read the article and be enlightened.