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KDE Adopting Mono
leandrod writes "The Register reports that members of KDE are committing to use and support mono, Ximian's independent .Net implementation. Not only does this provide KDE with some of the multilingual programmability it initially forfeited by its use of Qt, it also spells well for cross-desktop application and even KDE-Gnome desktop integration, because mono is developed by Gnome's most prominent ISV, Ximian, and is intended for Gnome integration." Update: 09/12 14:22 GMT by T : Actually, the Register story overstates things a bit, it seems. According to KDE developer Hetz Ben Hamo (heunique), "Yes, you can use QT# to write QT/KDE apps, but it doesn't mean that KDE will support mono. you can use kernel 2.4, but you can use any linux kernel or any other unix based OS." See also this comment from David Faure for more insight.
I believe MONO just uses the CLR standard that is given to the ECMA. The rest is just reverse engineering of the class libraries which i believe is still legal. Heck microsoft benefited from reverse engineering..
this just my guess..
alex
The use of Qt has not been a problem in allowing the use of various languages to program for KDE. There are bindings for Python, Java, Objc-C, C, Perl, and interaction over XMLRPC and via command line tools for shell scripts. C# is just another one of the languages which can now program with the libraries, and presumably, so are any other Mono supported systems.
Interested readers may wish to checkout the KDEBindings package in CVS, which is part of the KDE desktop officially since 3.0. Web CVS
What a load of mis-information....
.NET or Mono at this point.
The Qt-C# / KDE-C# developer might be proud of his language bindings (undoubtly it's cool that those exist), but that's no reason to spread such wrong rumours. (I'm not accusing him, it could very well be the journalist from TheRegister who's making most of this up).
There is NO decision from the KDE project to do ANYTHING with C#,
It's amazing how much bullshit people can invent.
David, KDE/KOffice developer.
The mono team is developing strictly independently of what Microsoft owns, projects such as the SSCLI/rotor and the MSDN documentations are only to be used very loosely as guides. Most contributions are based on the ecma standards.
My point is, mono should have no fear of Microsoft intellectual property / proprietariness.
There is no Mono code in KDE cvs.
Repeat: There is no Mono code in KDE cvs.
The only Mono discussion on either kde-devel or kde-core-devel has been by the Mono developers plus some Ximian people, who were there due to the CCs from the Qt Mono announcements.
Nothing to see here. Please disperse.
Well some of those more 'exotic' languages are already being implemented with Mono. Like Logo for instance has 'MonoLogo' :-)
As far as mixing languages, it's quite easy. If you want to mix the libraries that you were referring to then there would have to be bindings for those libraries. But any library that Mono or DotGNU supports can be used by any language that Mono or DotGNU supports.
As somebody who works on large products for large firms, let me assure you that I truley appreciate programmers who can and do "lovingly craft inline assembler into their C routines for speed and keep an eye on memory utilization."
However, there is a time and a place for that and most projects are not the time for that. I hate to crush you, but I find myself more and more hiring the type of programmer you are putting down. You know, the Business School MIS guys, instead of the Computer Science guys.
They may not be able to "lovingly craft inline assembler into their C routines for speed and keep an eye on memory utilization", but they can understand the goals, delivering a complete system that does X, is delivered by Y, and comforms to specification Z, so maintainence isn't such a nightmare. They also tend to be more willing to fully document their work, why won't so many geeks do this? Really, I want to know!
I recently had a major run in with one of my most talented code monkeys who had spent the last couple weeks branching his section of code off into a "more efficient design". He did save me 10% on my footprint, but he broke specs in doing so, which I am contractually obligated to not do. My MIS employees get that for the most part, they apparently understand things like business plans and liability. Oh yeah, the database guys would have to break specs and rework a couple weeks worth of work to implement his "more efficient design."
Now the project is most likely going to be a week or so late. The money our client will lose during that week would be enough to buy 20-30% more memory. So the more efficient design is actually a net loss for my client, as well as my firm, since the cost of revision is much more than the cost of upgrading the hardware. He doesn't get that, he thinks it is a sin to code like I want him to. He needs business training.
On the other hand, I do sometimes want to pull out my hair with the stupidity of some of my MIS guys, I sometimes wonder if some had ever even got beyond drawing forms in VB. But, I can teach them those skills much more easily than I can teach business skills to geeks with no interest in it.
My best employees usually fall into two categories:
1. CS guys who are interested in business, those who are geeks at heart, but hope to open their own shop some day, they will actually look at the BIG picture, not their little slice of the pie.
2. MIS guys who really do like tech, they are business folks at heart, but they really do love technology and have learned on their own many of the skills the Business schools didn't teach them.
PS- You are on crack if you think coding close to the metal is inherintly more stable and long lasting. Documentation and the ability to follow specs is key to creating systems that will work well immediately and in the future.
http://haydn.sf.net is your embedding into apache.
;-)))
You can already embed ASP.NET in there (or if you werea the O'Reilly conference, you could have seen ASP.NET embedded into Gnumeric).
Mono self-sustains, so that means that we can compile it with itself (the compiler and class libraries are written in C#). So you could say that for compiler work it is already usable
Other than that, it depends on the particular class libraries that you are looking for.
Actually, quite incredibly, they are not.
Now Microsoft has clearly stated that they own IP to parts ofThis puts Ximian and Mono or anyone implementing these ECMA specifications under a real legal threat.