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Mono 0.30 Released
Blair16 writes "From OSNews -- Mono 0.30 has been released. This release includes four components at once: the Runtime and Software Development Kit, the Documentation browser, and the ASP.NET server with its Apache module. Packages for various distributions are also available from our download page. This is mostly a fine-tuning release: bug fixing and performance improvements are the major benefits, but new classes and new features are also included. See the rest of the notes for details."
Sadly, the Debian packages are still in rather a strange state of limbo: You can get them if you can find the magic incantation to add to sources.list, but they're a January 14th snapshot (which isn't too old, but if you're going to do something from 2 weeks ago, why bother with a nightly snapshot in the first place, why not the last stable release?) and don't include libapache-mod-mono. Meanwhile libapache-mod-mono is also available separately but doesn't seem to work with the latest packages of everything else.
Which is making my attempts to port an ASP.NET application to work on mono a fairly frustrating experience, to say the least...
The Mono Project is an open development initiative sponsored by Ximian that is working to develop an open source, Unix version of the Microsoft .NET development platform.
.NET platform which is the core library. They will always be catching up in that initiative, and they might as well just develop a completely new base of libraries.
They may develop independant libraries, but the core of it is just implementing Microsoft's
Occam's razor is the blind faith in the natural selection of least resistance and in universal oversimplification. -- EF
Look in the FAQ. "Mono" means "monkey" in Spanish. Presumably, it's because of Miguel's heritage and the Ximian sponsorship.
Because of the associations in English (mono-nucleosis, mono-poly, mono-aural) it was not such a great choice.
Meanwhile, Mono already has a complete suite of open source toolkits and APIs that run rings around what Microsoft offers and let any Gnome programmer become instantly productive on the platform.
.NET: both Java and .NET require open source programmers to learn completely new APIs, APIs that are arguably proprietary. And in the case of Java, there isn't even a credible attempt at an open source implementation (of, for example, Swing), and it is questionable whether an open source implementation is even legally possible.
.NET environment and Java support, to the degree legally possible.
In that, Mono has a leg up both on Java and on
Mono, in contrast, offers access to many open source APIs and libraries (foremost, Gtk+, which is the de-facto standard for Mono GUIs) and, in addition, makes a credible effort at providing a
Overall, the progress of the Mono project over the last year and a half has been nothing short of astounding. GNU C, GNU C++, and GNU gcj, took much longer just to produce a compiler and runtime, and all the open source Java platform efforts are woefully incomplete in comparison. The closest in terms of offering a complete environment is perhaps Python, but Python is a much simpler system under the hood and has different range of possible applications.
Haven't tried Mono, but i sure hope it is worth the change, from win32 .NET SDK, does anyone know about its performance, is it worth leaving my GNU C, for this MONO platform, or should i use C# for win32, when it comes to a *nix i stick with a C/C++ or a JAVA?