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by James Robertson.
Original Post: No dogfood for us
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I got some amusement out of this
post from Panopticon Central. In a post discussing the relative
importance of VB and C# in the .NET world, he let this slip:
To wit: can anyone tell me, for the ten years (give or take)
between the introduction of VB 1.0 and the introduction of VB .NET
7.0, how much of the Win32 APIs or the COM APIs were written in
VB?
Of course the answer is: none, to my knowledge. In fact, the VB
team itself did not use VB in any meaningful way in its own
product. The VB runtime functions were all written in C/C++. The VB
forms package was written in C/C++. All of the VB controls were
written in C/C++. Beyond the VB team, every major Microsoft product
and operating system was written using C/C++. Every. Single.
One.
And he says that last bit as if it's a good thing. What
it indicates is either a severe weakness of VB, or a severe lack of
vision by the VB team. The product either:
Isn't good enough to write decent controls in
The VB team wasn't smart enough to see the value in eating
their own dogfood
And now they are "shocked, shocked" that people consider them to
be a second class citizen of .NET? They shouldn't be surprised that
VB was looked down upon for years, even given its popularity - the
VB team itself implicitly told people that nothing of real
importance should be done in the tool itself - "serious" work
needed C++ in the past, and C# now.
Now yes, the runtimes (VM) for VW and OST are written in C.
However, most of the environment is written in itself. Maybe
VB just doesn't have that power...
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