An Interview with Eric Gunnerson


© Jose Aniceto
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Aug 5, 2002




Eric Gunnerson

One of our goals in doing .NET was to provide our customers with a number of different languages so they can choose the ones that best meet their needs, and the individual language teams are tasked with providing products that best serve their features. From my perspective, customers should move when the benefits of the managed environment make it worth their while, and not because we think they should move. Though I'm in the C# team now, I still have a soft spot for the C++ product, and I think it will be around for quite some time.

Suite101.com

Should companies start migrating C/C++ based applications to C#?

Eric Gunnerson Companies should evaluate how .NET and C# fit into their long-term development plans. For existing applications - like most existing code - it's rarely a good idea to spend money creating existing functionality in a new environment. If there are problems with the application that .NET will really help on - and having to deploy the runtime with the application is acceptable - then by all means consider it.

I think it's much better, however, to do a few small new applications in C#. Porting an existing app is always a complex undertaking, and not something you want to undertake until you're really familiar with a platform, and what your architectural options are.

Talking about the future of C# ... Suite101.com

One area of C# development that has not been explored deeply is game development. How do you see C# fit into the game industry?

Eric Gunnerson

Currently, the goals of a managed environment are productivity and robustness, while many games need as much raw speed as possible, and often with some "near real time" types of execution guarantees. So, for games where frame rate is the driving factor, I think C++ is still the language of choice. Other games I think are already practical in C#.

In the future, it will be easier to use DirectX from C#, and as hardware gets faster and the run-time gets better, I'd expect this gap to close. I think this question is a lot like the assembly language vs high-level language tradeoff that used to exist in games, and over time the advantages of compiled languages became more important than the raw speed of assembly. I'd expect most of the guidance in this area to come from the DirectX team.

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Here's the follow-up discussion on this article: View all related messages
2.   Oct 30, 2002 6:55 PM
In response to message posted by elizabeth_rennie:

Thanks Elizabeth. I also enjoyed corresponding with

-- posted by Jose_Aniceto

1.   Sep 20, 2002 2:47 PM
Jose,

I enjoyed the format of your interview.

Elizabeth Rennie - CE Internet & Business World

-- posted by elizabeth_rennie



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