http://www.linux-mag.com/2001-04/GCC_net_01.html GCC.NET
What is Required for GCC to Support Microsoft's .NET?
by Mark Mitchell

The February 2001 Linux Magazine presented an article entitled Embrace and Extend: What Can Linux Learn from Microsoft's .NET? In that piece, Jon Udell put forth the notion that Microsoft's .NET initiative is built upon a number of ideas that have substantial technical merit and argued that GNU/Linux users ought to consider embracing and extending the platform.
However, while that article laid out many of the reasons why .NET might be interesting to GNU/Linux aficionados, it did not spend much time on the technical aspects of how supporting .NET on GNU/Linux would work. Because this is a topic worthy of further discussion, we will take an in-depth look at what it will take to make the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) support .NET.
The .NET initiative is Microsoft's bid to permit the development of components, written in a wide variety of programming languages, that can execute on a wide variety of operating systems and hardware platforms. Put more simply, Microsoft thinks you'll be able to write Python code on a SPARC Solaris workstation, Visual Basic code on a Windows NT machine -- and seamlessly link and execute the two together as one program on an embedded system. You can even add native libraries provided by the embedded system vendor. Furthermore, the resulting program will run fast, because an optimizing compiler designed especially for the embedded system will compile