Pros and Cons of using existing runtimes?

Mark, are the cons worth the pros of using existing
runtimes (.NET / CPython)? What are the cons? 

Runtime:
-------
You won't be able to do what you will with the
low-level stuff. eg. MS, not you, will say how and
what features go into the CLR. Some of your
interesting ideas will not be achievable. (In this
sense, Mono's CLR will have to follow MS as well to
maintain compatibility.) This would decrease some of
prothon's "strange attractor" factor. For me at least.

Deployment:
----------
To use prothon, people will have to download and
install a potentially huge package if they don't
already have it installed. Future Windows will
undoubtedly have this but if you look at the numbers
wrt upgrades, a lot fewer than expected have upgraded
to WinXP. Many will need to install this runtime thus
raising some bars to entry.

Mindshare:
---------
Prothon is still new (not even 1.0 yet!). Using .NET,
prothon will be just another obscure language that not
many will want to even try. You'd have to have a
really big idea in the language itself to get people
to use it in .NET. Consider that prothon would also be
going up against the python juggernaut of ironpython!
Is prothon compelling enough to use instead of python?
(python now has multiple books, websites and code
example repos) If not, why use it? 

C# has MS behind it. Java has Sun. Python has the huge
and ever growing Python community behind it, not to
mention big names like Google using it. Prothon?

If you do *really* decide to go CPython or .Net route,
that's fine. Prothon *is* your project after all but
I'm just worried that prothon is relegated/dismissed
to obscurity even before it's born. Which would be a
right shame since the primary reason I came to be
interested in prothon was that it was, to me, a
potentially better python than python!

As a side note: For libs, you said yourself that the
interesting python libs are C extensions anyway - why
not simply do a 'swig' to prothon? Et voila, instant
libs! Why is this no longer a solution to your libs
problem?



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