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Mono Poises to Take Over the Linux Desktop
Edd Dumbill writes "Miguel de Icaza and the Mono team recently hosted a two day open meeting in Boston. O'Reilly have just published
my report of the meeting. Highlights include
Miguel's view that 'C is dead!' and the Mono approach
to dealing with Microsoft patents on .NET."
C is dead? Has Netcraft confirmed this?
"I once thought I had Mono for an entire year, just turned out I was really bored..."
Karma: Terrible
long live c!
I realize that this is an unpopular opinion here on Slashdot, but C# is actually a pretty cool language and the .NET runtime is a promising platform. Microsoft didn't just dream this up overnight... they had a lot of smart people working a long time creating this beast.
It would certainly benefit us to learn about these technologies and leverage them, rather than to unilaterally declare them evil, wrong, stupid, etc. and just bury our heads in the sand and pretend they dont exist.
Aside from being a the primary source of Mediterranean winds, Icaza has apparently forgotten about that whole "Linux" thing that is built on that whole "UNIX" thing that was built using that whole "C" thing. I applaud his salesmanship. I deplore his view that the desktop is equivalent to the operating system.
Will Mono Become the Preferred Platform for Linux Development?
by Edd Dumbill
Why the hell would I believe someone with the name of Edd Dumbill?
That must be the "Alan Smithee" of the so-called "tech writers." It's probably just dumbshit Alan Seeburgh in disguise, playing hooke from CNN.
This falls under the "I can't believe what I'm hearing" category...Mono is *not* ready as a plug in replacement for .NET, and it won't catch up before MS releases 1.2...for the foreseeable future, it's trailing behind the Windows implementation and is not likely to catch up.
I see PyGTK as a much more reasonable (and WORKING) alternative to C programming for people who want to write Gnome apps. Or GTK--, for that matter. Mono currently has crappy System.Windows.Forms support (even with Gnome#), broken serialization support, the list goes on and on.
Doesn't the Monodevelop IDE look suspiciously like Eclipse?
Are we supposed to clap?
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
It would certainly benefit us to learn about these technologies and leverage them, rather than to unilaterally declare them evil, wrong, stupid, etc. and just bury our heads in the sand and pretend they dont exist.
I think that about a lot of Microsoft technologies -- but to be fair, I'd say that the mere existence of Mono is evidence that a process such as you have described is already in motion.
The coolest voice ever.
I realize that this is an unpopular opinion here on Slashdot, but C# is actually a pretty cool language and the .NET runtime is a promising platform. Microsoft didn't just dream this up overnight...
.Net is a nice language with some advancements over Java, but not different enough from Java to make its existence worthwhile. It's just leading to a lot of duplication of effort across the world (like Ant and Nant, or JUnit and NUnit).
Yes, it took at a least a couple of days to copy all the Java libraries and ReCapitalizeMethods,
Seriously though,
Now if they'd come up with something like Haskel# as the primary language (instead of hamstringing other languages and making all of the core libraries Java like) or something really different that actually advanced the field of programming as a whole, then I might be more appreciative But as it is I see the tremendous duplication of effort across the world to do the same things in Java and C#, and it just makes me sad.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
.....at their own game.
.NET than .NET
You can't a better
Anyone remember "a better Windows" than Windows called OS/2?
--fatboy
Languages written in C:
....
perl
python
ruby
As it is, I don't want to even attempt to emulate another 'grand MS idea'...especially since there are already superior non-MS systems out there that puts .net to shame. No, I'm not going to cite those systems...do your own research. You'd be surprised.
Die Mono Die!
I've been playing around with the Mono implementation of C#, and it's pretty good. It's not quite as good at RAD tasks as Python, but it has some advantages, and the syntax is much easier to play with than C or Java (but again, not quite as easy as Python, but I'm biased in that regard).
However, Mono suffers from the fact that they're trying to play follow the leader by following Microsoft's implementation rather than creating a system of libraries from scratch. Microsoft has a history of pulling the old "embrace and extend" trick, and I fear something similar may happen here.
My guess is that Microsoft will significantly alter the .NET APIs for Longhorn, leaving Mono behind with older legacy libraries that are no longer interoperable with the Microsoft compiler and the rest of the Windows-using world. Needless to say, that would be bad for the Mono team.
Still, if Mono can remain independent, it could very well have a bright future. The Mono team has done a great job of implementing most of the 1.0 .NET API, and the mcs compiler is pretty fast. The GTK bindings are quite nice for such an early release.
Still, the cognitive dissonance of compiling a Linux program and getting a file with an .exe extension is rather difficult...
- C.
1) Rave about C# .Net
2) Convert everything to run on Mono C#
3) Get sued bad by the world's most deep pocketed software publisher except that unlike SCO vs. Linux this time the evidence is on the side of plaintif.
IMO, I think Parrot will become the .NET equivalent in the open source world: a language independent VM and a huge standard library. I can't wait to have access to CPAN from my Python programs.
Sure, C# is a lot nicer than C, but Python & Ruby are a lot nicer than C#. If you're going to give up the predictability of C/C++ for a VM, garbage collection, et cetera, why not go all the way up to dynamic execution?
Bryan
It is official; Netcraft confirms: C is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered C community when IDC confirmed that C market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that C has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. C is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Programming Language Usage Audit.
You don't need to be Scott McNealy to predict C's future. The hand writing is on the wall: C faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for C because C is dying. Things are looking very bad for C. As many of us are already aware, C continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
C++ is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time C developers Mark Markup and Sally Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: C is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
C++ leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of C++. How many users of C# are there? Let's see. The number of C++ versus C# posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 C# users. C++ posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of C# posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of C++. A recent article put C# at about 80 percent of the C market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 C++ users. This is consistent with the number of C++ Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Redmond, abysmal sales and so on, C++ went out of business and was taken over by Microsoft who sell another troubled programming language. Now C# is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that C has steadily declined in market share. C is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If C is to survive at all it will be among language dilettante dabblers. C continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, C is dead.
Fact: C is dying
Exactly, there will be "kind of" a functional language - which has to use the same libraries everyone else does, which are all just like the Java libraries. So people using this pseudo-functional language will be hard-pressed to really see the advantages of a functional language as you would if you had a real function language with a set of libraries as broad as that offered by Java.
.Net and C# is the perfect vehicle to migrate users of all other languages to C#, not really to make life easier on people who want to work in one of the non-C# languages.
I formed this opinion long ago, just around when C# first came out, when I read an article by one of the founder of Eiffel talking about how Eiffel# would work (I wish I had not lost the link - I can no longer find this article). He saw opportunity at that point to gain new Eiffel programmers. But I saw only a tar baby, where the longer you worked with the system the more you just said "Well, all I'm doing is calling C# libraries with this weird syntax so I might as well make life easier by just using C#".
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
don't bother mentioning .NET community sites that host on .NET or Match.com. Those aren't transaction heavy or trading systems. Glorified webpages that serve up database tables are simple. A decent developer can build it. Building a transaction application that can handle 500-1000 moderately complex transactions (update/insert) per second is hard. .NET can't handle it, or atleast I all the cases I've heard of in the financial industry failed miserably. If you're in this industry you already know. If you're not, you're probably saying "what bs, .net can scale just as well."
Yeah, try to build one in .NET and tell me how many servers you're going to need. then tell me how you would run real-time analytics on all the rows in a given table when you've partitioned the table across 8 machines and each has 8 million rows. When the CTO says, the query has to take less than 30 seconds, what will your answer be?
.Net is the platform in which C# is the closest natural representation of what the bytecode is like. As such, .Net is a vehicle for C# and a distorted reflection of all other languages.
.Net is the VM and C# the language. But as Java has shown, it's not really so easy to keep the two wholly separate. They are interdependent to some extent.
Yes,
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
1) When people think of ..., or "mono," they often think of extreme tiredness as one of the major symptoms associated with this illness.
Ditto
2) Loss of appetite and generalized weakness also may be present, especially in adolescents. Nausea, hepatitis, jaundice, severe headache, stiffness, chest pain, and difficulty breathing can occur in some cases. A pink rash can occur all over the body in children who have been treated with ampicillin or amoxicillin.
ditto again!
3) Some may experience extreme fatigue, staying in bed for more than a week because they feel too weak even to walk around the house.
We're three for three (esp. after a failed Windows update session...)
4) 'Mono' is generally a self-limiting disease, which means it goes away on its own in most cases. Occasionally mono can cause complications
Need I say more...
5) Epidemic outbreaks in hospitals and workplaces have occurred.
` My biggest fear! Remember kids - practice safe computing!
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
There is almost no difference between C#/Mono/.NET and Java, but almost no Linux developers write in Java. Check out your distribution's packages and you'll almost see more JVMs than Java apps. And for some reason Linux developers avoid Java like the plague, even though it's got a godzillion features that make everything so much easier (garbage collection, huge consistent class library, security, etc). Put in a GTK or QT library interface instead of the slow and huge Swing (that Smalltalkers foisted on Java) and you're golden -- there's every reason to use Java, especially for applications.
The Linux culture has so far prevented Linux from taking the next step. Just look the (essentially) complete lack of interest in gcj (gcc open-source java). Just look at the slow pace of Mono. It isn't goind to happen anytime soon, unless the Linux app community wakes up and sees the future. Yeah, 10 years from now we'll still be doing manual memory management. Sure...
C is inferior, yes. It's hardly dead though.
I think C deserves a little more respect than a blanket comment like this.
We still have assembly languages today for several reasons, even though it's been "dead" since the 80's. Driver writers, compiler writers, and high performance inner-loops of scientific apps NEED snippets of assembly.
Thanks to the design goal of c (as the paint on the metal), you can now program in mixed c/assembly and thus never have to actually write anything in raw assembly files anymore. But you still write with the intention of generating specific sections of assembly.
The people that write c are those that are resource conscious. I am not aware of ANY other language that is allows resource management as well as C. "performance" is just one resource, and I know many argue that JIT's counter-balance the performance advantages of optimized c. I still refuse to belive JIT's have ever approached -O3 performance, but am willing to concede that a well written VM app can perform acceptibly.
ButMemory is another key resource management position that sometimes requires hard computer science to derive workable solutions.. When you abstract how resources are utilized (via a VM), then it negates the value of such hard computer science. Note that this ONLY applies to a particular problem space. Though, a non-trivial problem space to be sure.
The point is thus that the classic paradigm of "the right tool for the job" is essential here. There are MANY problems that are best done with low level, very concise languages like c. Most OS components, VMs, or fast-duty-cycle applications should very well have core work done in c/assembly.
The obvious other end of the stick is managing large amounts of code, for which assembly need not apply, and c is indeed becoming a distant memory as I think you are implying. Yes, web-services and many such fast-to-deploy applications transcend c, but don't be too quick to write-off the value in having a generation of computer scientists that are not well enough versed at writing low level applications.
-Michael
Hmm.
The initiative it takes to back-engineer the
The whole idea of chasing after a proprietary standard like
If Microsoft doesn't want the
Unfortunately, Miguel seems to have a fairly long track record with this sort of Microsoft-chasing. You can run along and play catch-up all you like with other technologies, but, it'll be just like it is with Gnome ---- With Gnome, you're guaranteed nothing better than a perpetual second place finish. Gnome amounts to a Windows wanna-be, instead of a Windows-killer, when it didn't have to be that way. Miguel made it that way.
Look...If you HAVE the talent to do something better, for God's sake, do it. Don't waste your time (and other peoples time) churning out flea market knock-offs of worthwhile products. I'm certainly no fan of Microsoft..I just call it like I see it.
Bowie J. Poag
Great! Now there's only 25 letters I have to teach my kids.
So far, there's a surprising enthusiasm for Mono and C#
Latebreaking news flash! A reporter attends a Mono lovefest and discovers that the attendees are having a lovefest!
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Mono is a DotNet wannabe.
DotNet, of course, is a Java wannabe.
Why not just use Java? Oh, that's right:
Microsoft - Duplicates anything they don't own and control
Open Source Movement - Duplicates anything someone else owns and controls
If I need to write a daemon that handles 250,000 hits/hr, I write it in C. Hands down, C is the only language I know where I can control memory and CPU usage. The only language where I can predict what will happen with some accuracy. If I write a program in Python or Java or whatever, it starts consuming RAM, it starts context switching at the wrong times, etc. On a recent Python project I had to actually go into the Python memory allocator (written in C) and do some hacking, because it didn't work right for my project. So obviously C is well and alive.
.NET program on Windows, I ... USE WINDOWS! Maybe I'll "play" with Mono, but at the end of the day the only reason I'd use Mono is for Windows interop. Not to replace Windows.
.NET's dev tools and IDE for Ruby, then I'll get excited.
If I need to write a quick script, but make sure it's clear enough to understand next week, I use Ruby. A lovely, well-designed language. Why bother with compiling and linking? Go dynamic.
If I want to use an awesome development environment, I use Mac OS X. Aside: sometimes I wonder if people who rave about the latest scripting language or the latest Windows dev tool, have ever actually *used* NeXTSTEP/Cocoa! It's still light-years ahead of what most people use. Look how many examples in the Gang of Four patterns book come from NeXTSTEP!
And, if I need to write a
C# is a nice improvement on Java. Which isn't hard to do.
Like a lot of folks I look at Mono and I just don't get the point of it. It's Microsoft's technology, it's always going to be playing catch-up... to a mediocre environment.
Give me
What does Mono stand for? I heard it stands for 'Microsoft, Oh No'
Cheers,
RoadkillBunny
I respect Miguel, but I think he seriously underestimates the risk posed by MSFT's patents in this area. Quoth the article:
Microsoft has granted a license to use this technology under so-called "reasonable and non-discriminatory" terms.
"Reasonable and non-discriminatory" (RAND) does not imply "free". RAND was the proposed licensing requirement for W3C patents that was howled down by the community.
Given that MSFT is willing to finance SCO to use arguably illegal tactics to destabilise and discredit free software, who would expect that they are above enforcing a small fee for every patent needed to implement Mono? They needn't do this immediately, in fact it is in their interest to wait until the technology is widely adopted, so they can slug everyone at the same time. Note that the usual legal defences against "submarine patents" won't work either if the terms have been disclosed to be RAND all along.
Well, if we can get to the point where we can do things like those shown in this Longhorn video, development for Linux will definitely increase.
By the way, the video is worth watching not only for the cool technology but also to hear two Microsoft programmers ragging on each other. Totally opposite the kind of atmosphere you'd expect at Microsoft, I suppose.
We have Gnome because Trolltech refused to release QT under a free license in the early years.
The prevalence of KDE at that time showed us that a large proportion of the F/OSS community would cave to non-free software if it was convenient.
Until recently a mutually beneficial relationship existed between Gnome in the community and Ximian as a commercial provider, analogous to the relationship that exists between OpenOffice.org and Sun's Star Office.
Now that Novell owns Ximian (OK Novell are currently our friend, but that may not always be the case) and Miguel is exposing the community to litigation from Micro-Soft down the track through the introduction of non-free technologies (and procedures, methods, etc. which are likely to be covered by upcoming patent laws) the GNOME project needs to distance itself from the disruption that the Ximian guys represent in order to avoid contamination.
Miguel has a solid reputation and has done a lot for the community, but in this case he is either (best case) a fool for thinking that Micro-Soft can be trusted or (worst case) a quisling. Either way, it's barge pole time.
Intel have a C compilers on a bunch of platforms. So does GNU (and Sun, and Microsoft).
Software doesn't suddenly become useless simply because another vendor releases a competing implentation on the same platform. If MS do release a
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
The first programming language(s) were coded in ASM, Assembly Language. Although ASM is a "language", it doesn't need to be translated and compiled like something like C. Each operation corresponds to opcodes, which are usually one or two bytes, that the CPU can directly read and interpret. Once powerful and stable C compilers (written usually in ASM) started to appear, new languages were usually directly written in C, but always containing some ASM.
The main problem that confuses people (such as the argument that C# was written in C#) are the IDEs (the Integrated Developpement Environment), which is merely a graphical frontend to do your work. So yes, the VS NET 2003 UI was made in C#, but the compiler for C# was written in C and ASM.
I hope this makes sense...it's 2:30AM...lol
Best regards,
Alex Ionescu
Relsoft Technologies
Miguel said, "C is dead", sure.
But how about some context. This is what he actually says: "To me C is dead. Except for the JIT!" (emphasis mine).
He's not saying C is gone, that nobody is going to use it anymore. He's saying that he's not using it anymore, except to write the JIT compiler for mono.
So the quote is accurate, but the meaning is completely changed once you put it into context!
I take that to mean, "As far as the world of Mono/.Net goes, C is dead."
I can write a web server in bash in one line! AND it installs itself.
apt-get install apache
verily... bash has gazillionized my productivity... it used to take me over six months to write a decent web server.
-pyrrho