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Mono Beta 2 Released
A little birdy writes "Less than a month after Beta 1 was released,
Mono Beta 2 has been released. See the Release Notes, or go directly to the download page. It includes a C# compiler, an implementation of the Common Language Infrastructure and two stacks of APIs: a Unix, Linux, GNOME, Mono stack for APIs that takes the most advantage of your Unix server and desktop and a set of APIs compatible with the Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1 that provides support for ASP.NET (web services and web forms), ADO.NET and many other components." And in a related story: darthcamaro writes "The drive to develop a FOSS implementation of Microsoft's .NET framework by DotGNU and Novell's Mono project is being painted as a contest between the Free and Open Source communities in an article on internetnews.com. The article details the running argument between DotGNU's Norbert Bollow and Mono's Miguel de Icaza on the issues of commercial involvement, software patents and all the 'religious' stuff that the Free software community holds against the open source community."
Well there is a compelete java vm which can run exclipse for mono. ( i know thats pretty hard to get the head around )
ikvm
also all major asp.net applications run
You might want to look at slides from Brainshare
/ pu blished/DL208/DL208.ppt
on System.DirectoryServices, and the expanded Novell.LDAP namespace:
https://secure-www.novell.com/brainshare/portal
Miguel
We do support two stacks of APIs today in Mono: the Microsoft compatible stack (ASP.NET, ADO.NET and Windows.Forms) but we have been investing heavily in taking advantage of our own set of libraries that Linux, Unix, Gnome, X, Mozilla, CORBA specific.
For instance, Microsoft uses XmlSchema, Mono supports it, but distributed RelaxNG support as well.
We are working on Windows.Forms, but we also have strong bindings for Gtk# to build native applications. In fact MonoDevelop (www.monodevelop.org) is fully written using this stack.
We support the Microsoft database APIs, but we ship providers for all the open source (Postgress, MySQL, Sqlite) providers and other third party databases (DB2, Sybase, Oracle).
Tao is a backend agnostic set of 3D graphic APIs (OpenGL, Cg, SDL) while we still plan on supporting the Direct3D managed APIs.
Our set of APIs is what has allowed us to build things like MonoDevelop: a fairly complete IDE for Mono for developing Linux-based applications.
"I would highly recommend you actually do some research for yourself rather than forcing /.'ers to do it."
Well, quite.
RAND != Royalty Free and Non-Discriminatory
RAND == Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory
So, in fact, they *can* and *do* charge money to licence patents under RAND. RAND is not good enough for any Free Software, GPL or otherwise.
"Elmo knows where you live!" - The Simpsons
Mono is fairly efficient, but there is a lot of
room to grow optimization wise. There is no clear
answer to this question. Although Our JIT engine
implements a fairly advanced SSA code optimization
platform, and it also allows for pre-compilation
in batch mode (we typically get a 20-25%
performance on applications) it really depends
on the software you run.
Typically we have been able to tune Mono when
people have pointed out a major performance issue
by profiling the problem: sometimes the fix is
simple, sometimes it requires the JIT codebase
to be improved.
Work on improving the JIT engine continues,
we recently checked in better register allocation
for some corner cases, better inlining of intrinsic
functions, loop-based optimizations and removing
array bounds checks.
If your program is I/O bound, a different set of
issues arise, so am sad to say `it depends'.
miguel.
We are using the Boehm collector in precise mode,
so all we are missing is the compacting features. It does a fairly good job, and we can run large
applications with good success.
Doing a compacting collector is in our radar,
but we have to balance our resources: port to
new platforms, support 2.0 features and improve
performance.
Mono 1.0 will use Boehm, but after that we might
consider using a different collector (in fact,
we have some preliminary patches for doing
refcount-based systems).
will the applications I write with this stack work on Windows?
If you write a pure C# program that does not use the GTK-Sharp , QT-sharp, or any other neat bindings, it should run. The very simple Hello World apps work.
I still think that the mono developers are straying a bit from what they should be doing. For the windows forms, they are relying on certain wine-libs. This works, but is not as elegant as it can be. Miguel was talking about the next incarnation of gnome being written in C#, essentially using the Gnome bindings for it. My opinion is that they should build gnome to natively handle the windows.forms portion. I am not so tied to the look of the applications as I am functionality. I could care less if Microsoft.office.NET looks like gnome when run on gnome.
You can do cycle detection in reference counting,
there are various papers on the subject.
Refcount is bad for small apps, but good when you
have applications that use a lot of memory (since
scanning even with generations is an expensive
process).
There are various papers on Citeseer on the
subject.
Hello,
;-)
Yes, thanks to the work of Carlos Guzman and
Sebastien Pouliot we now have support for TLS and
SSL (it is a fully managed implementation
miguel.
Although those benchmarks were done against
our first JIT. We redid our JIT to address that
(and many other issues), so the data is relatively
old (one year+)
Muine, a media player
Woodpusher, an ICS chess client (seems to have stagnated recently though).
Dashboard, an exciting new user interfact paradigm.
I'm sure there are others, these are the ones I remember off the top of my head.
This isn't exactly true. You can run gtk-sharp applications on Windows. There is a Win32 port of GTK. You can't, however, run gnome-sharp applications on Windows. But GTK is good enough for most GUI apps. I am not sure about qt-sharp and Windows though. There is QT for windows, so I imagine qt-sharp should work.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Umm, you obviously haven't look at mono that carefully have you? The JIT also exists for PowerPC linux and S390 linux, in addition to Solaris SPARC, PowerPC MaxOSX and Linux x86. There is an interpreter for a whole slew else.
As for the class library, that's just FUD that you're spewing. Yes they have chosen to use Wine for Windows.Forms, no use in reinventing the wheel here for a tiny population. But all the applications the parent of your post mentioned don't use windows.forms. In fact, the engine is flexible enough that Miguel got MonoDevelop (the IDE they've ported from SharpDevelop) to run on his Mac under OSX. See his blog entry for more information.
I wrote a fairly complex simulation engine under Mono that runs flawlessly on my Mac and Windows. This includes a user interface that is not Windows.Forms.
My Slashdot account is old enough to drink...
Yes, they already are ported. You can write GTK/GTK+/GTK# apps for Windows today.
/ BuildingGuide?PHPSESSID=d0459fba82585e5219f9d4c95c 24721f
See http://www.nullenvoid.com/gtksharp/wiki/index.php
for an on-line guide.
I've been using GTK apps like GIMP and DIA at work where I'm stuck with Windows for a long time now.
GIMP Win32 installer: http://www2.arnes.si/~sopjsimo/gimp/
DIA Win32 installer:
http://dia-installer.sourceforge.net/
BTW there are very few if any "linux only" libs. Most of those libs are part of the GNU System, they work with the Linux kernel, BSD variants, Solaris, and most UNIX Systems. Many have Win32 ports or ports to the Cygwin POSIX environment for Windows.
"As flies to the wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for sport." - William Shakespeare, King Lear
Do not presume that MS's past use of patents for defensive purposes only means there is a low probability of threat to the Mono project...
MS has hired an IP manager who not only believes in but has spearheaded IP rampages.
"Marshall Phelps has long been a vocal advocate of the need for companies to take IP licensing seriously."
"...he inspired at his previous company, IBM, which is now reaping almost $2 billion a year from licensing its patents."
"At IBM we did a lot of it. We had lots of lawyers doing preparation and prosecution around the world. At Microsoft, we don't have anyone doing that, but we are going to start."
"According to Phelps, managers too often fall into the trap of seeing patents as a purely defensive measure, a tool with which to stop the competition in their tracks.
Phelps says he is pleasantly surprised by just how understanding Microsoft's executives have been. "On these IP issues I don't have much of a problem getting anyone's attention at Microsoft. It starts at the top, and if you've got a guy like Bill Gates who's really concerned about IP and really likes it then you don't have much of a management problem."
Make no mistake about it, Microsoft has learned to do business by using its capital to get what it wants. Microsoft cannot buy out FOSS but they sure as hell can litigate FOSS directly or indirectly to "stop the competition in their tracks."
As most everyone here knows, FOSS has been on the Microsoft radar for several years now and they have been very active and very unsuccessful in halting the progress of FOSS.
This is the last ditch effort on Microsoft's part to stop what is becoming an unstoppable force. It will not matter if the FOSS community produces a better and more technologically advanced product because Microsoft will not be competing based on the merit of their products.
Whether or not the patents that are filed are frivilous and ridiculous, they will be used offensively to diminish the threat of FOSS to the Microsoft revenue stream.
Be prepared, there is more of the SCO syndrome to come.
burnin
A few updates on VB.NET:
We have a full time developer working on this
(Anirban) and you will see a lot of work on
compliance from him.
Mainsoft has donated a full VB.NET runtime that
we are now integrating.
Rafael and others have just obtained a grant
from the government of Brazil to complete the
VB.NET support in Mono.
And in addition to that, a few open source developers
work on it on their spare time.
You are right, the Open Source developers are not
particularly thrilled at doing VB.NET, but it is
important to bring developers from Windows, so
that is why the effort is being funded.
Miguel.