Rotor, we hardly knew you
A big part of the plans behind the Rotor (aka. Shared Source CLI) project was for a community to develop around the variety of projects that were possible with the release of the code for the core of .NET. A web site went up at sscli.net and a few projects got off the ground, but the interest quickly dwindled.
Every so often I’d point people to the browsable code at sscli.net, where they could find good examples of how to implement various Win32 APIs on FreeBSD and Mac OS X. But when I went to the site a few weeks ago, it was down. It has stayed down, and I don’t have any way to know when or if it’ll come back up. I wonder if anyone other than me has noticed.
The Shared Source CLI site at Microsoft is still available, but all it includes is the tarball for the Rotor 1.0 release. That means it doesn’t have browsable code, it doesn’t have any of the side projects, and it doesn’t have things like my changes to get Rotor to build under Panther.
Maybe Microsoft will build a new version of Rotor when the next release of .NET is out. If they do, hopefully the community around that release will last a little bit longer than this one did.
Daniel Jalkut Said,
February 6, 2005 @ 8:51 am
Thanks Eric - I hadn’t heard about this before, and I just went to Microsoft to downloaded it. (I’ve subscribed to your blog recently, so I missed the previous entry about it).
One thing I noticed is that your Panther diffs link is broken:
http://rescomp.stanford.edu/~ejalbert/rotor_panther_diffs.txt
from
http://outofcheese.org/archives/2003/11/03.html#001190
I would really like to apply those diffs since I’m not looking forward to duplicating your weekend of hacking
I agree it’s a shame that there was a fledgling community around this code that fizzled out…
Daniel
Eric Said,
February 6, 2005 @ 12:25 pm
Yep…sorry about that. I’ve corrected the link.
Andrew Pontious Said,
February 6, 2005 @ 1:26 pm
Wasn’t Rotor only for educational purposes, or something similar?
I.e. you couldn’t base commercial or shareware projects on it, you could just look at it.
Why learn new APIs when you can’t use them? I’m not surprised there wasn’t much interest.
Eric Said,
February 6, 2005 @ 1:31 pm
Oh, I’m not surprised at all. But the site was useful, so it’s a shame to have it disappear.
Andrew Stopord Said,
February 7, 2005 @ 2:28 pm
Hi,
Just so your aware please take a look at Roberts post.
http://weblogs.asp.net/rhurlbut/archive/2005/01/04/346601.aspx
Andrew