ericsink · HackerTrans

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Interesting. I left Spyglass in January 1997, just as they were heading in that general direction.

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I don't remember anything about "Microsoft Mosaic" as a name, but we definitely retained the right for Spyglass to sell our own browsers.

In my recollection, the initial payment from Microsoft to Spyglass was higher than what Marc said, but I'm not sure.

But I am sure that the deal was later renegotiated at a substantially higher number.

I'm also pretty sure that even after that rework of the terms, Spyglass didn't get enough from Microsoft to compensate for the fact that Microsoft, er, you know, killed the browser business. And insofar as that is the essence of Marc's point, I agree with it.

ericsink

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Based on my understanding, some of the details he gave about the Spyglass/Microsoft situation are not quite right, but I don't think it would appropriate for me to provide specific corrections.

However, since I was the Project Lead for the Spyglass browser team, there is one correction I can offer: We licensed the Mosaic code, but we never used any of it. Spyglass Mosaic was written from scratch.

In big picture terms, Marc's recollections look essentially correct, and he even shared a couple of credible-looking tidbits that I didn't know.

It was a crazy time. Netscape beat us, but I remember my boss observing that we beat everyone who didn't outspend us by a favor of five. I didn't get mega-rich or mega-famous like Marc (deservedly) did, but I learned a lot, and I remain thankful to have been involved in the story.

ericsink

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Shameless self-promotion:

https://wordmax.game

Released for public preview just today.

Game play similar to Scrabble, but played "duplicate" style.

Admittedly not exactly "quick low-stakes".

ericsink

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I too miss discriminated unions in C#.

But even more often, I find myself wishing C# blocks were expressions.

In F#, I could do this:

  let x =
      let z = whatever
      ...
      value

and z is inside a local scope.

So in C#, I want to do:

  var x =
  {
      var z = whatever;
      ...
      value
  };

Maybe it's just me.

ericsink

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(Author here)

Well this is a blast from the past.

Back when I wrote this, I kinda hoped F# would surprise me and gain more traction than I expected. But 8 years later, if anything, it seems like the dominance of C# in the .NET ecosystem has grown.

F# is still a great language, but the main fact hasn't changed: C# isn't bad enough for F# to thrive.

ericsink

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None of those are working yet. I'm hoping to get things going with MAUI.

But I've made some progress with Avalonia.

Here's a sample using Native AOT and Avalonia, with a projection to Rust:

https://github.com/sourcegear/bridge-info/tree/main/samples/...

And here's (basically) the same sample projected to TypeScript:

https://github.com/sourcegear/bridge-info/tree/main/samples/...

These are built using the binding generator I mentioned elsewhere in the comments here. All this stuff is just raw tech, not a ready-to-use solution.

ericsink

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(Author here)

Most of the buzz about .NET Native AOT is focused on things like startup time for compiled executables in cloud environments. For good reason.

But Native AOT also supports compilation to libraries with a C ABI, including both shared libs and static. My blog series tends to lean in that direction, talking about interoperability.

Some of the posts talk about very fundamental things. Some of the later posts give mention to a (somewhat experimental) binding generator I've been working on, using CLR metadata to automatically create glue and projections for other languages like Rust and TypeScript.

In general, interop between C# and other languages has been possible for a long time, but Native AOT allows it to be done without hosting a CLR, and as the feature matures, I think that'll make it more interesting for some use cases.

ericsink

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Indeed. I've been using the .NET 8 previews with Native AOT on an M1 Mac for several weeks, and things work quite nicely.