Never underestimate Moore's Law: Do we need a CLR debug build?
Back in '91 when I started my career, I worked for a company that made an object-oriented development environment named Actor. It was a clunky-slow environment to work in although it had great features. About the time that we had memory and processor speed enough to make it a great environment, we helped to cook our own goose by developing ObjectWindows for Borland in Object Pascal and C++. In the painful ramp-up to master C++, I observed that we would be stuck with C++ until a new language came out with a new development platform and OS. Java was not that platform, because it tried to be all things to all people. Aim for the lowest common denominator and you often hit it. The CLI, in contrast is that environment.
Brad Abrams is thinking out loud whether we should be subject to a split personality for the CLR by re-introducing the ghastly debug build. However, reflecting on my earlier experience, I would say to let Moore's Law have it's way. The CLR is already quite fast enough for the vast majority of applications and in a few short years will be so for an even higher percentage. Let's not re-invent clunky solutions like the Real-Mode and shared multi-threading solutions of old that were overtaken by Moore's Law. Is that a world we really want to return to?
Update: Rico Mariani weighs in on Brad's suggestion.