James Gough

Distinguished Engineer, Java Champion, Speaker and Author
JDConf Day 1: Microsoft’s Open Source Languages Journey

27 Oct 2020

Empower every developer and every development team on the planet to achieve more

C/C++ is one of the most contributed areas at Microsoft, with active contributions to the standards committee. Open source contributions include direct Clang/LLVM to support C++20. Microsoft has made efforts to ensure that they are no longer behind with C++ and aim to be the first tooling provider to be C++20 compliant. Open sourced STL library implementation and improved VS Code integration. C# is a language that is mostly associated with Microsoft. In 2014 the language was open sourced along with the .NET platform. C# has a vibrant community with huge contributions from across the community (100,000 contributions). Python is another area of contribution for Microsoft including contributions to Python Core.

In 2012 Typescript was an attempt to work in the open and opensource a language from the start. Is used by 58% of professional JavaScript developers, and is also used to build Visual Studio Code.

What about Java?

Microsoft heavily depends on Java and it is critical to success, for example LinkedIn has over 1500 microservices in production. Microsoft has over 10 Java Champions and have been engaged in speaking at most major conferences. OpenJDK ports for Window and macOS on Arm and have added performance enhancements for Java on Windows.

GitHub is the home of OpenSource, hosting 3.6 million Java Repositories. GitHub actions support many CI/CD aspects of OpenSource project.

Java on Azure is not surprisingly another important aspect to success at Microsoft.