I bet Microsoft would like to buy Xamarin too, but worry that might strain Xamarin's relationship with Apple and/or Google. This could be a "if it aint broke, don't fix it" scenario.

Actually that sounds so reasonable. I have been asking myself why Microsoft hasn't bought Xamarin. But Xamarin is actually an amazing Trojan Horse for Microsoft.

If by some miracle Visual Studio ever ran on non-Windows platforms, Microsoft would then be free to kill off Xamarin Studio.

And as long as we're being evil, I wouldn't mind seeing Microsoft buy up Light Table (if that's even possible) and build some of its features into Visual Studio. Namely inline eval and live code modification.

I suspect they'd have to rewrite Visual Studio into ClojureScript or similar if they went that route. Which would certainly be interesting.

Though I'd certainly be all in favor of inline eval and live coding in VS!

Both of which it has have via Roslyn/Edit and Continue.

Interesting. I knew VS had been working toward features like that; I wasn't aware they'd come as far as they have. Though from my poking around there appear to be some limitations: no redefining lambdas in a live session, for example. And I'm pretty sure that Instaparse is still out of reach, though that's not really what was being referred to. But thank you for reminding me, it's been a while since I've had an occasion to touch VS.

Exactly, like Nokia bought Qt ;)