The latest installment of our ongoing series about Volta's deepest, darkest secrets brings us to language support.

Secret #3: Visual Basic

Sometimes, it seems as if honesty does not pay off. In the "known issues and limitations" section of the Volta documentation we mention that we do not fully support Visual Basic. From this some people quickly conclude that we treat Visual Basic as second class citizen. This is rather ironic because whenever we talk about Volta our demos are usually done in Visual Basic.

The reason we do not fully support Visual Basic in this specific scenario is simply because we do not support the full Base Class Libraries (BCL) when compiling to JavaScript; and some of the types that we do not support (such as Reflection and CultureInfo) happen to be required by the Visual Basic runtime.

We know how to solve this problem; it is just a matter of work. Unfortunately a lot of work because the BCL contains rather many types that are all quite tightly coupled to each other.  Instead of delaying the preview release of Volta while we did this work, we instead opted to get Volta into developers hands quickly to discover things we do not know yet.  Further Visual Basic support is something we will continue to work on as we iterate on Volta.