What is the advantage of a programmers VM apart from portability
- by user619818
I can understand the benefits of Java running on a JVM. Portability. Nice simple reason. But I have always been puzzled as to why Microsoft brought out their own version of a JVM - .NET. C# is supposed to be a fine language (haven't used myself) but could Microsoft have launched product to use native. ie to generate an exe?
My colleague is learning F#. The reason it has to be a language which runs on .NET is because the Microsoft Lync API which will be used is only available on .NET. ie there is no C API for Lync.
A cynical view may be that the reason is vendor lockin. F# will only run on a Microsoft platform (or C# for that matter) and so program is locked in. But maybe I am missing some other benefit of a VM platform?