Microsoft is moving standardization of its object-oriented, type-safe C# language to a public repository of the .NET Foundation, providing a public space for ongoing work on the standard.
Everything from language innovation and feature design through implementation and standardization will now take place in the “open,” with conversations public. This will make standardization work easier, Microsoft said. The dotnet/csharpstandard repo on GitHub will be the working space for the ECMA C# standard committee.
The move follows previous efforts to open up C# including open sourcing the compilers in 2014, which are now in the dotnet/roslyn repository, and setting up dotnet/csharplang as the official C# language design repo. Developers can see the work in progress on the draft text for C# 6. Work to incorporate C# 7 features also is taking place.
Changes planned for the coming months include:
- Issues in csharplang and dotnet/docs for the spec text will move to the new dotnet/csharpstandard repo.
- The C# spec on docs.microsoft.com will be replaced with the version from the standards committee.
- The C# 6 draft spec will be removed from the dotnet/csharplang repo, once the proposed C# 6 draft is published on docs.microsoft.com.