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Mono and .NET - An Interview

Posted by chrisd on from the not-the-kissing-disease dept.

all-of-the-dot writes "Would you use an open-source implementation of the .NET Framework? Ximian's Mono project enables you to build .NET apps that run on Linux and Unix as well as Windows. Check out the story from .NET Magazine's interview with Miguel de Icaza, Ximian cofounder and CTO" Added to which, AirLace writes "The Mono project has just achieved full self-hosting on Linux. While the C# compiler, itself written in C#, has been able to compile itself since March, Mono can now compile its own complete set of class libraries too. This announcement closely follows the release of the Phonic media player, the first .NET application for the GNOME desktop."

4 of 583 comments (clear)

  1. Re:bad news for Linux? by miguel · · Score: 5, Informative

    Developers in the Windows world that do not care about cross platform issues (which is, 99% of them) are tired of C++, and Visual Basic, and C# happens to be a nice language to move to delivered by the company that does their OS.

    So people will be adopting C# as a programming language no matter what anyone does. The language is here, and the tools are here, and the community is rapidly growing.

    So what we are enabling is to bring a number of things to Linux: we bring the people, the knowledge and we are reusing Microsoft's investment in documenting, promoting and producing training materials to benefit us.

    So, I am fairly possitive that this is good.

    And then, there is the added advantage of open source: now you got a compiler, a runtime and classes. If they serve your purposes, take it, improve it, extend it, change it, modify it, rip it, research, reuse what you feel like reusing.

    Miguel

  2. Re:Just Wondering by miguel · · Score: 4, Informative

    We are not planning ourselves on writing one, but several people have expressed their interest on doing so.

    There is already a proof that this can be done (Microsoft's JUMP), but it is not fundamentally a hard problem either.

    There are three groups of people to my knowledge working on free software versions of such a tool.

    Miguel

  3. Re:Who else is amused... by samael · · Score: 4, Informative

    You can call non .NET programs from within .NET. If you decide to use a library that only exists in Windows (like DirectX) or in Linux (like that version of GTK) then of course it only works in that system.

    Once more of Mono is complete, you'll be able to do the whole of your program in it, including the libraries, and moving between Windows and Linux will be transparent.

    --
    My Journal
  4. Re:What about Dot-GNU? by miguel · · Score: 5, Informative

    DotGNU is = Portable.NET + other_stuff.

    Portable.NET and Mono are doing the same things. Mono is a lot more advanced than Portable.NET: JIT, a working compiler, large development team.

    About the `other_stuff', I have never been able to figure out what it is, or what they are doing.

    It is a duplicated effort as you very well point out. From the Ximian perspective, we did have the resources to work on this project, and we had our developers work on it.