DotGNU and Mono Continue

saurik writes "After what has been a strange few weeks of converse between the DotGNU and Mono teams (including a small PR SNAFU that involved the banning of a member from the DotGNU mailing list), DotGNU has now announced that they will be forming a partnership with Portable.NET." Frankly I like that there are 2 efforts going on. Maybe one will succeed.

Comments

Interesting effort...

[Karma Sucks]

For those who didn't read it through, here's some scoop from the Portable.NET faq:

3.2. Why not co-operate with Mono?

I tried suggesting that we divide up the work to prevent too much duplication of effort, but Mono seems set on re-inventing all of the wheels that I already had several months prior. Mono's idea of co-operation at the moment is "do it our way or no way". Therefore, I will co-operate with Mono when they start co-operating with me.

3.1. Mono

The Mono project that is run by Ximian has many of the same goals as Portable.NET.

Mono is oriented towards building a .NET-capable framework that works well with GNOME. This means that their system is unlikely to work well with any other desktop environment, or with PDA's that don't feature GNOME.

Portable.NET is designed to be more general purpose than that. It has very few dependencies on other libraries so that it can be integrated with any desktop or PDA operating environment.

Mono's C# compiler and other tools are written in C#. While academically interesting, this will incur a severe performance penalty on the toolchain compared to Portable.NET's use of C. It also means that it will be longer before Mono can natively host a .NET development toolchain on Linux.

Future versions of Portable.NET will also support compiling C# to the JVM, which isn't something targeted by Mono as yet.
---------------

I think it is really interesting that Portable.NET intends to target the JVM. Now we are getting somewhere. Also their version of .NET does not create needless desktop dependencies, so more power to them. I am a bit surprised at Ximian's attitude at the whole thing though, where is the logic? To read the full faq go here:

http://www.southern-storm.com.au/pnet_faq.html

Java Community Process

[SuperKendall]

For those mistaken enough to think that Java the language and VM are not open, take a look at the Java Community Process.

Are you saying there can only be one standards body? Personally I think the important aspects of a standard are that a consortium of many different companies and people from all over (including individuals) be involved, true of the JCP. The Java bytecode is a standard, and other VM's have been written by many people. The Java langauge is a standard, anyone could write a compiler and feel safe knowing what to expect.

What is the difference to you between the JCP and ECMA? Why do you consder changes through one body open and the other not?

At JavaOne, a speaker was moaning about an aspect of the language not going in until later than Sun wanted (Generics - not out until 1.5) - but he was also happy that the JCP was working in that it was going against Sun's wishes on the matter and the community process was in control.

Those of you siding with MS and imagining it will be more "Open" than Java are in for quite a rude shock!