The correct title of this article is X#. The substitution of the # is due to technical restrictions.
This article is about the xBase-compatible programming language for .NET. For the assembly-like language used by the Cosmos operating system, see Cosmos (operating system) §X#.
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The X# compiler is intended to support multiple dialects in the xBase programming language family. It supports Core, Visual Objects, Vulcan.NET, xBase++, Harbour, Foxpro and more. The project is intended as an opensource community effort, but is at the moment still partly closed source.
History
In 2015, the majority of the developers of the Vulcan.NET team started the XSharp compiler development due to conflicts with their previous employer GrafXSoft about future developments.
As a proof of concept and viability, the Vulcan IDE was recompiled and rebuilt in XSharp into XIDE.
On July 3, 2017, the first general release (version 1.0.1, Anjou) was published. Version 2.5.1.0 was released on July 6, 2020.
The X# development team consists of former members of the Visual Objects and Vulcan.NET development teams.
Supported dialects
At the moment the following dialects are supported:
XSharp Core language: This language lacks a native dialect runtime, which means that there are no USUAL, ARRAY and other xBase familiar datatypes. Only the native available datatypes of .NET are available.
Vulcan.NET: The official runtime of Vulcan.NET can be used or the by XSharp provided alternative runtime.
Visual Objects (VO)
xHarbour
FoxPro/Visual FoxPro
In the future, the team intends to also support the following dialects:
XBase++
Technology
The XSharp compiler is based upon the Roslyn compiler and can make full use of the available .NET framework classes.
It integrates with all known editions of Visual Studio 2019, 2017 and 2015.
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