What is the purpose of Microsoft.Net.Compilers?

Question

What is the importance of this compiler? Is it a must have or could do without? What is the purpose of having another compiler anyway, or is it just a futuristic project? A

Answer 1

As others have said, it contains the .NET compilers for C# and VB.NET.

An interesting aspect of this being a package is that you can specify a specific build of the compiler to for your project, including a version that hasn't been shipped with Visual Studio yet.

We use this in https://github.com/dotnet/project-system which is an open source component of Visual Studio. It allows us to use pre-release versions of the compiler to dogfood language features not supported by the compiler that ships with VS.