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Mono and dotGnu: What's the Point?

Posted by michael on from the fighting-words dept.

joeykiller writes "The Register features an opinion by Neil Davidson, asking 'Mono and dotGnu: What's the point?' Some of the points he raises may seem irrelevant for open source supporters (like why make a C# compiler while Microsoft's is free anyway), but others are thought provoking and maybe a little bit controversial. You may not agree with his opinions, but it's an interesting read anyway."

4 of 493 comments (clear)

  1. Free for who? by abrotman · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Last I knew, the .NET framework was only available for Win32 and FreeBSD. Has this changed recently? I dont really see a problem with Mono. If they can make it so that System.Forms works with GTK/Qt, that would be rather nice. I would imagine this would lead to tons of portable apps. Of course .. Maybe i dont understand .NET

  2. Free from MS, but for how long? and can we extend? by elwinc · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Sure, right now there's a version that's free from MS, and probably fairly unencumbered. But for how long? Well, as long as Java is still competitive.

    If Sun and Java die, MS will be free to add proprietary bits, and we'll still want a free version.

    Also, although there are some nice things in C# (such as being able to work with arbitrary C pointers and data structures returned by C functions), we may want to tweak the design a little, or extend it to work with python or lisp or other languages. The idea of a "glue" language that can call routines written in many languages is very appealing. Sometimes you might want to have one program that can deal with low level data structs like C, handle resolution theorem proving like haskell, and maybe strings like snobol. With a good glue language, yuo could write each routine in its appropriate language, then glue them all together.

    --
    --- Often in error; never in doubt!
  3. Wine + Mono = Instability by Vagary · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The grandparent is correct to complain that it is an unstable mix due to the fact that both Wine and Mono are under rapid, and asynchronous development.

    About 6 months ago, when I gave up on using Mono for development, the Windows.Forms implementation required applying custom patches to a specific nightly build of Wine which was so old that Mono was the only place to get it from. So maybe if you were successful in getting your patch into the main Wine tree, and maybe after Wine matures a lot, Mono will be worth another look.

    Also, I understand that the Mono team is aiming for complete compatibility, but I'd be tempted to declare that platform-specific hooks are unacceptable in a VM. After all, SWT seems to have achived fine graphics control with a much more abstract solution.

  4. Re:Technical Director? by e2d2 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    As for me, I think it's a cute project, but it's only use I see is cross-platform GUI applications. (a good thing for Linux adoption by the masses) And Mono is way off for doing that.

    And that "cute" use is enough to get Microsoft developers like myself actually interested in Linux development.

    1. So Win32 developers can create applications in a high level environment similiar to Java on linux. Java is great. But so is .Net.

    2. So we can port .Net applications to Linux faster.

    I want to use c# and .net on Linux. I'm not gonna sit here and ponder the what ifs the article author ponders. He is just a troll seeking eyeballs and a clue.