Re: Running .Net Natively on IBMi -- MIDRANGE-L

Nice.

If you need someone to test it, I'm always happy to give it a go.

I would think if it can run under Pase or Qshell it could be very useful.

During off-hours I'm currently building some IBMi wrappers around the Git commands as well as Python and Node so green screen folks can wrap their minds around them and integrate to traditional workloads. Did some Java wrappers CL command wrappers a couple years ago.

I'll post links once they are available in an online repo.

The git wrapper will be especially useful for quick and easy versioning of source files from the green screen.

Not to perpetuate the old and green, but the reality is there are still lots of uses for CL commands in IBMi workflows.

A real use case is with our forms engine, customers want to version the IFS templates often, but are not using any IFS level version control. Takes 10 seconds to create a new git repo and commit IFS files to it and establish a version control workflow in the IFS.

Also versioning source members will be easy via CL commands that can snap into PDF for those still using it.

Easy way to introduce die-hard IBMi shops to simple and easy source control.

Regards,
Richard Schoen
Director of Document Management
e. richard.schoen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
p. 952.486.6802
w. helpsystems.com

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message: 5
date: Thu, 11 Jan 2018 16:49:32 -0200
from: Alexandre Bencz <alebencz@xxxxxxxxx>
subject: Re: Running .Net Natively on IBMi

Hi!

This is something interesting and I was thinking and talking about it
with Mark Waterbury, I have an old project that I wrote in order to run
compiled programs for the .net architecture, on several devices, like
android, and at the time, Linux and also windows!
This virtual .net machine that I wrote, it does not compile the OPCODES
for a specific architecture, the machine simply interprets each opcode
and goes running the program...
As I wrote the VM in ISO C99, I'm thinking of porting it to os400 to be
able to run some compiled programs for the .Net architecture

Alexandre S. Bencz

+55 {15} 997-980-511

On 11/01/2018 15:59, Richard Schoen wrote:

Hey Kevin,

Changed the title for this response.

Interesting synapsis.

To your comment on Mono, an IBM internal team undertook this several years back and the process was squashed.

Perhaps you can get Tim or other internal people who squashed the project to resurrect it.

I'm always happy to discuss.

Here's the text from Bill Seurer's personal site link: http://www.seurer.net/mono.html

This page was last updated on 10/09/2008 10:22:53

Mono? You mean the disease?

I get quite a few questions about this so I thought I should let people know what's up.

I was part of a group that in the summer of 2006 ported Mono to run on PASE on IBM i (aka AS/400 and i5/OS). PASE is a runtime environment which is really AIX so AIX programs can usually run without change under PASE and vice-versa. You can run PASE programs from "native i" and communicate back and forth without too much trouble.

Anyway, we mostly finished and could run .net programs just fine. There was still some work to do on function calls that had prevented us from getting some of the libraries to work (like the graphics ones) when the time for the project ran out. I continued tinkering with it for a few months but despite my interest in continuing (and my area's interest) I've had to move on to other projects.

Unfortunately the licenses under which Mono is developed were disagreeable to the local lawyers and so it has sat in limbo ever since. That also means I can't release the source that we worked on.

I've been contacted many times since then so there is still interest out there.

A couple people have asked me how much work it was to do the port. I spent probably 4 or 5 months of effort on it and I worked with a team of 4 interns who spent 3 months working on it. Of course some of that time was learning about Mono and .net in general and not actually working on the port itself. I don't know what the code is like in the current Mono release so I don't know if it would be more or less difficult now.

Regards,
Richard Schoen
Director of Document Management
e. richard.schoen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
p. 952.486.6802
w. helpsystems.com
----------------------------------------------------------------------

message: 1
date: Thu, 11 Jan 2018 03:34:19 +0000
from: "Kevin Adler" <kadler@xxxxxxxxxx>
subject: Re: Convert a database file to Html format - Python perhaps ?

.NET Core is quite the undertaking:
[1]https://github.com/dotnet/source-build/blob/dev/release/2.0/Documentation/boostrap-new-os.md

Requires Clang & LLVM compiler stack to be ported to work in AIX/PASE.
There may be changes in .NET Core itself required to support PPC, likely
for the JIT.

Also requires the following libraries compiled in to PASE:

libunwind
lttng-ust
openssl
krb5
curl
liblldb
icu
libuuid

(These may have further dependencies as well)

Mono would probably be easier to get going, since it can be compiled with
GCC.

References

Visible links
1. https://github.com/dotnet/source-build/blob/dev/release/2.0/Documentation/boostrap-new-os.md