Miguel de Icaza Explains How To "Get" Mono

LeninZhiv writes "It's perhaps the most controversial project in the open source world, but this mostly stems from misunderstanding: Mono, the open source development platform based upon Microsoft's .NET framework. Immediate reactions from many dubious Linux developers have ranged from confusion over its connection with .NET to wondering what the benefits of developing under it are. Throughout the course of its four years of intense development, sponsored by Novell, Mono founder Miguel de Icaza has had to frequently clarify the .NET issue and sell the community on it. In this new interview, Howard Wen asks Miguel to explain himself one more time."

Comments

Re:Anyone Have Actual Experience With Mono?

[kc8kgu]

About a year ago, I wrote a C# webserver that did basic authentication, cgi, and directory browsing. It had a GUI but I partitioned it so that the webserver wasn't depenent on the GUI interface. I downloaded mono, created a console front end, compiled and ran it. Flawless. I didn't have to change one single line of code in the webserver class. Thats all I need to know. (BTW, this was on a windows box.)

Re:Anyone Have Actual Experience With Mono?

[jone1941]

I'm sure I know less than most, but here are my general experiences with it.

Mono Vs C++ - this is not a normal comparison due to one being a byte-code language and the other being compiled. That being said, I'm continuously impressed with mono's speed (especially compared to Java). It's current downside is an increase in memory utilization (compared to c, c++).

Mono Vs. .Net C# - The only major difference is mono's lack of complete support for windows.forms. This is windows primary API for building C# gui apps under windows. Mono is working on an implementation of windows.forms, but I personally prefer gtk# which is portable (at least to windows afaik). Also, they have and ASP.net implementation which is suppose to have great compatability but I can not speak from experience here

Mono compatability claims - here's the shocker, it really is very compatable with microsoft's C# .net platform. We're talking about ECMA specifications here, so they really can strive for compatability, it's less of (though not completely) a moving target than the WINE people have to deal with. They use to have a page listing package status, I can't seem to find the link anymore.

Disclaimer: I've been working on various small personal projects using mono for the last 6 months and have been using various apps centerend around mono for about the same.

Re:Anyone Have Actual Experience With Mono?

[kc8kgu]

No forms at all, gtk or windows. As I said I whipped up a console (cmd line) front end just for the mono test. I should also mention that this webserver was heavily multithreaded - which is another important yardstick for the maturity and stability of their code.

I have tried Gtk#

[r6144]

I ported a Doom map viewer I wrote in C/GTK/Glade to Mono/Gtk#. It was about 20k bytes of C code. Converting it to C# took little effort, though being almost my first C# program I had some difficulty deciding between structs and classes for data structures (C# classes have significant overhead when there is only a few members, and C# structs doesn't seem to be as flexible as C structs). The resulting C# code was a little less verbose (about 20% fewer bytes) than glib-style C code, since I no longer need to call g_free()'s, and callbacks are more concise in C#. It worked perfectly under Mono.

My only gripe was the lack of a decent debugger (monodbg hardly worked then), but it was quite a while ago, and I hope someone would post their experience with a newer version of the debugger.

Re:The Secret of .NET

[micromoog]

The most important sentence in the interview is near the bottom:

de Icaza: We are making Linux a fertile ground for third-party developers: we are allowing developers with Windows/.NET expertise to use and distribute software for Linux, easing the adoption of Linux.

Re:I don't "get" Mono either.

[tc]

Programmer productivity is higher in garbage-collected (MS calles them "managed") environments such as Java and .Net/C#.

In addition, it's much harder to make programming blunders such as overstepping the bounds of an array or string, which can in turn lead to security vulnerabilities.

Those two reasons alone are enough to favour a Java/C#-type approach in situations where absolutely bleeding-edge performance isn't a requirement (i.e. almost all of them).

Re:why?

[man_of_mr_e]

Lol. I love these kinds of conspiracy theories. They completely ignore the facts.

Microsoft is now wedded to .NET, whether it wants to or not. Longhorn's userland is now largely .NET based (WinFX) making .NET apps first class citizens of the OS. Core Longhorn technlogies such as Avalon and Indigo are written in .NET.

MS isn't dumping .NET anytime soon.

Re:The Secret of .NET

[The Slashdolt]

You're absolutely correct. In the end, .NET apps written on windows will not work on Linux. But .NET apps written on Linux will surely work on windows. How this gives people incentive to move towards linux(as opposed to away from it) I will never understand. I want to see MS write MS Office in .NET so that it runs on linux. You think they'll do that? Yeah Right!