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Comment by stephth | Hacker News Reader

Right. Who would ever want to be able to write libraries that can run on any platform?

I'm not saying there isn't a need, but I'm interested in knowing of another need. Hasn't this been done in C already? C pretty much runs anywhere, after all. What exactly does this bring to the table?

Sorry that people thought I was being negative (as per all the downvotes - you people really aught to comment), I'm just curious as to why other languages don't fill this gap.

If you have a C# back-end and a web front-end being able to write validations in this, that can run in both places, is one obvious use-case that I can think of.

C# is nicer than c, and writing bindings for c libraries in other languages is not fun.

I would say that I like C++ more than I like C#. C and C# are entirely different beasts.

I don't think the goal is optimal performance. It think it's popularity and ease of use, and c# is popular, reasonably easy to use, and low level enough to make it possible to translate it easily to many languages.

To avoid the downvotes acknowledge that the article already declares the purpose and ask for more details. As it is you come across as not having read it, but opining negatively.

To your question - in my case I had a server returning XML/JSON output and on the client side I needed to parse the output and convert it into an object model, collect changes and ship the. Back to the server. That was a lot of boiler-plate code we ended up repeating in java, C#, javascript, and C++. We used C++ version in lieu of Objective C and it was a pain with memory management mismatch.

>C pretty much runs anywhere, after all. What exactly does this bring to the table?

1. No, C doesn't run everywhere. I can't compile C to Java, C#, JS, AS, Perl and D. Or compile it to any other language (PHP, Objective-C, Pascal, ...) just by writing 500 lines of generator.

Look how huge project Emscripten is: 1 537 390 lines according to Ohloh. But JS generator for Ć is only 457 lines.

2. C# is easier than C. You can write Ć in Visual Studio C#, the best, easiest and fastest IDE in the world.

1. A compiler translates from a higher level language to a lower level language.

2. I disagree. They have the same level of complexity, C# possibly more if you use advanced concepts. And you can write C in Visual Studio...

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