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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."
Rather than continuing to de Icaza drone on and on trying to vindicate his project again, is there anyone here who has actually USED Mono and has something to say about it one way or another? Particularly interesting issues:
.NET C#
- Mono Vs C++
- Mono Vs
- Mono compatibility claims
Insight from some USERS would probably be more beneficial now than more bickering over what Mono is or whether it should even be.
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Trying to tell people on Slashdot how to get Mono is kind of pointless. First you've got to talk to a girl.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
It seems rather unfair to call those developers who do not support Mono "dubious". Surely it would be better to say they are "sceptical".
Interesting interview. I often find myself talking in bullet points, but the way Miguel adds boldface and sublevel indents while talking - now that is an achievement.
The dreaded "kissing disease" mono is transferred through saliva from one living host to another. Mono may incubate, biding it's time, in the human host for up to a month before it starts exibiting symptoms. Once mono kicks in, expect swelling of the throat and lymphic nodes, headaches, and extreme fatigue.
Victims of mono can be identified by the paling or discoloration of the skin, and will commonly walk with a shuffle and have half-opened eyes because of fatigue. Because of the swelling of the throat they may have difficulty talking, and will usually only talk in groaning sounding, short sentances. They will hunger, and they will hunger for something that they can manage to swallow, such as soft, succulent human brains. If you see anybody shuffling towards you, looking dead tired, moaning braaiiiiiiiins, it's best to stay away, or you too may be infected. You may become infected through exchanging saliva, or more commonly, having the sick exchange salive with your blood in an attempt for him or her to feed off of your brain-meats. Mono infected people only take half damage against physical attacks, and can only truly be killed by completely desroying the body through total physical damage or by burning. Recommended for parties of 4-5 players, levels 6-8.
I think Miguel is doing all of this because he feels that .NET will be the future of doing things. I remember a few years back all of those MS people having cosmic orgasms over .NET, even though nobody really knew what the hell is was.
Maybe Miguel knows something we all don't?
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How would a new VM architecture be useful? What do you imagine it would be capable of that .NET is not? How much use would such an architecture get when it has no compatibility with anything else in the world? Why does Microsoft get slammed for creating a new proprietary technology and calling it 'innovating' while Open Source projects that reuse existing systems are slammed for not 'innovating'? How quickly do you think a VM as complete, efficient, and powerful as Mono's could have be written if they didn't have the Microsoft CLR to target during development (it was a year or two before Mono was self-hosting, yet during those initial years it was still developed at breakneck speeds) ?
The whole point of implementing a standard is to copy.
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I know that .NET has never been horribly well understood (even by .NET developers) because of the marketing mess MS came up with, but Mono is a VERY good thing.
.NET framework (a great technology) was perhaps one of the most dangerous weapons against Linux. Very powerful, and makes things VERY easy. So developers of Windows applications will move to .NET framework (where before .NET framework more and more Windows developers were looking at Java, etc) and BAM these developers (and their software) are again locked into Windows. So Windows will remain domainant since its so easy to get applications for.
.NET (wait for it) have also just learned what they need to develop for MONO (Linux). The millions of software titles which will be developed in .NET (wait for it), can now be fairly easily ported to Linux. So most of those products won't be F/OSS, big deal if it makes software companies jobs of porting their propietary software to Linux easier thats all we need! Once such software exists on Linux, may be I can suggest Linux to non-tech family and friends. Until then I know Windows is better for them as they cannot tell a line of code from a line of anceint san-script. They just want a huge variety of software to choose from.
This is especially GREAT for those Linux lovers out there. Linux has MANY advantages over Windows, but for the most part this doesn't matter (sorry talking about desktops here not servers). Yes, lots of techies have jumped on board but that is pretty much a spec on the radar. For Linux (or any OS) to make real gains (especially in desktop) there needs to be HUGE 3-rd party software market for the OS. We need video editing, tax, accounting, etc, etc, etc. And this means broad developer support.
This is where MS has always had a huge advantage. For good or bad, it has always been VERY easy to develop applications for Windows. In my opinion the
Enter MONO. Yes, it a copy of a MS technology and we all hate MS so we think its bad. ITS NOT!!!!! This is great! Those millions of Windows developers who move to
OK I've go on too long, but MONO is GREAT!!! It can only help the Linux (F/OSS) community even if it is a port of evil (MS) technology.
This is where Mono comes in.
"reality has a well-known liberal bias" - Steven Colbert
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.
C# and the .NET Framework *are* powerful and *do* provide things nothing else does in quite the same way. This guy shouldn't be trying to explain it to us so we can "get" the Mono project. He should be asking "How come you guys are so hung up on your religion that you question this so much?"
I have to say, while C# is an ok language I just don't see the point of having mono without .net. Its going to drive developers to window (where the best tools /standard implimentation is).
The Open Source Community has no lack of projects for developers (gcc/vi/emacs/apache foundation).
Linux clearly needs better developemnt tools and more developers working on these unglamorous development tools. Projects like eclipse give me hope the first class development tools are comming to opensource. I fear C# even with Novell's $, is never going to be up to snuff with the ms version, always chasing, not living up to the write once run anywhere hope.
And with so many projects in need of help (gjc/ parrot(perl6)/gnustep) do we need more?
This reminds me of the disaster that is the dual GTK/KDE (QT) desktop libraries thats really put linux destop development in a crappy place. People really do want to cut and paste across applications, and not worry about 2 or more sets of windowing libraries. I know you can run a GTK app on KDE, but it doesn't seem to make for an easy end user experience. Its not bad to have multiple items, but at some point a winner should be clear, and everyone should move on (not linger like the dvd+/dvd- standard where the solution is to have dual format drives.)
Having seen some of the new Apple API's development stuff, I was blown away but what a company with a vision can do to leverage open source for development.
First, release a C# compiler for linux. If you can get developers to user C# that compiles to native code so that it's not dependant on the CLR, then you can introduce the cross-platform aspects of it.
While I agree that it would be nice to do away with the overhead consumed by the virtual machine, I was always under the impression that [with maybe a few exceptions*] the creation of a compiler for a language is relatively trivial.
The thing that makes these virtual machine languages so powerful [and the thing that makes them so appealing to the marketplace] is not that nonsense about "compile once, run anywhere" [which, as I understand it, has largely proved to be a fraud], but rather the feature-richness of their libraries: So much stuff has been written into the libraries that the application programmer's job devolves into not much more than providing a little glue to hold together the specific library calls that his project needs [i.e. it's foolish to reinvent the kitchen sink if it's already been invented for you].
*One instance where I've heard that the compiler end of the thing is rather impressive is javac's handling of multithreading logic.
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).
It's not just "another VM".
.NET now. That's a lot of applications, and especially, vertical market applications.
.NET with a commitment to maintain only "100% managed code". What does this mean?
It's the VM that right now thousands of software vendors are writing against.
Virtually of MS's ISVs are writing against
As these next batch of applications gets out to the market and Mono continues to mature, you will see that a Linux desktop can be an excellent companion to a corporate or small business setting.
My wife works in the medical field. The software vendor they support are porting their Windows app to
It means that when released it will, very likely, run without any modification on Mono, and therefore Linux, and probably someday Mac OSX.
That's huge.
I'm hearing all sorts of things here about how great Mono is, and how it's going to let all those new Windows apps run unmodified on Linux, as if it's the new WINE. Great, but how many Windows ISV's care about Linux? The ones I've met do not. And that means they're going to make use of every Windows-only API (sorry ... "assembly") that Microsoft throws at them.
Welcome back to the moving target that's plagued WINE for more than a decade. Once they get Windows.Forms up and running, Microsoft will come up with some "must have" new API that the ISV's will start using. Maybe it'll be Avalon, who knows.
Mono makes it possible to write cross-platform apps that don't need to be recompiled (linking to Qt# or GTK# for example) but don't count on Mono being the magic bullet that suddenly makes an entire generation of Windows software run on Linux. Microsoft isn't that stupid.
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I see all sorts of comments about "Why do I need that if I'm running Linux? I'll just write my code in C/C++ and compile natively!" Basically most of the people here lack the ability to step back and see this from a much wider perspective. Mono isn't so much here to help the existing Linux developers develop under Linux better, but to allow Windows developers and Windows software companies to (more) easily make the transition to Linux.
.NET code when moving between platforms, but compared to the rewrites that are often necessary with other languages, the time investment is minimal. With Mono you can pretty quickly move your app from Windows, to Linux, to MacOS.
Sure, you still have to rework parts of your
Mono (to me) is more of an outreach project, a bridge like WINE or Cedega to the Windows world. It's a note saying "Hey guys, I know we haven't been on the best terms in the past, but we want to make it as easy as possible for you to come over and pay us a visit on the other side of the OS world. Bring your code with you too if you'd like, we're working on making that work too!"
There is a very simple solution to all this.
Rather than Miguel having to repeat himself over and over in defense of Mono, why doesn't Novell just release the legal opinions they have on the important issues related to Mono?
Instead of telling us not to worry, just give us the facts.
I realize that this is a lot to ask of a company, but the FLOSS community is hard to satisfy. It wants to get the real info, not just the marketing.
Novell doesn't need to release their whole Mono legal opinion. Just enough to answer the questions that concern OSS developers. For example, could the EMCA parts of Mono ever require a license other than the GPL? What is likely to happen with the Mono implementation of ASP.NET?
Lol. I love these kinds of conspiracy theories. They completely ignore the facts.
.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.
.NET anytime soon.
Microsoft is now wedded to
MS isn't dumping
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Serious!
I make my filthy living doing enterprise Java apps. I love my Linux servers and my Powerbook. But I don't go around preaching the gospel of Java to the unconverted. And that's exactly the point: Linux already has two useful and proven languages for desktop apps - C/C++. Make those better!
I almost feel like Miguel has been living in the corporate world a little too long, thus, like you said, his preaching of something else - a typical thing in the real world is not to fix it, but to re-do it in some other language. I see this stuff all the time and just roll my eyes. Then I spend ridiculous hours helping various teams meet their goal.
This is actually classic if you think about it. At first, KDE, namely Qt, was not open source. So instead of trying to fix it they made an entirely new desktop system. Of course, Qt later dropped those restrictions and now Gnome is the fat dog that can't get off the porch. So the mantra is if it doesn't go our way, we'll re-do it, but make it worse! Deja vu anyone?
Linux does not need sloppy developers porting all their crap from Windows. I mean, I think of all the junk out there on download.com.com.com.com and try to visualize that on my Mac (fortunately that's not possible) and a chill runs up my spine.
If you want to program a Linux app, learn C - it's not that hard and it can actually be, dare I say, fun! If you find something you don't like or you see is broken, submit the changes/fixes back to the community. Yay, you're an open source developer now!
C aside, sure, people will use Python, Perl, Ruby, nothing wrong with that. But these are languages with a Unix history, not a VB one. So I think the whole premise of wooing developers from a flawed platform design - ergo flawed programming logic - over to something that has much more academic exposure and a very rich history (I'm talking Unix here), is a disaster waiting to happen.
When I first started being interested in programming desktop Linux I didn't go look for Java bindings (altho, I did look for a JDK for server stuff), I used what was out there; in other words, I didn't try to re-invent the wheel! That said, yeah, sure, the C/C++ libs aren't perfect nor are they the holy grail of software development. I dunno, it just strikes me as odd, like some alien invader trying to convince me feverishly to get on board his space ship but won't tell me why(if you can imagine that), that there is so much push for Mono. Does make sense, I suppose from a corporate control point of view. Mono's roots are in the devil and that's enough for me. Yeah, sure, Sun owns Java, but Sun's also a Unix (yes, somehow that DOES make it milimeter better, esp compared to M$!) company and I have a little more faith in their corporate sesspool than Microsoft's. Altho, Schwartz is kinda dorky.
Anyway, the last line of the above post says it all; anyone invoking the name of Mr. Graham in a way that's pure and simple has the last word in my book.
Hmm, you mean like how gcj produces native java executables that are faster than running bytecode in the JVM? Oh wait. No it's slower. One of the main facets of .NET and Mono, though, is the ability to precompile the binaries to speed up loading (but not running). The thing about running code in the JVM and the CLR is that programs slowly get faster and faster as the jitter tweaks the optimizations and caches them.
Therefore I don't see any real point to producing native executables. Heck you don't even see to many people clamoring for a perl native compiler or a python native compiler. Although they exist most people simply don't need them. The future is in languages like Python, Perl, C#, Java. Bytecode compiled or even straight interpreted languages are really coming of age. The bare underlying hardware is becoming less and less relevant.
Believe it or not, Objective-C and Cocoa still have advantages that C# has yet to catch up to.
.nib files are actual serialized object graphs, so there is no code-generation. At run-time, the objects are just loaded into memory automatically as though they were created in code. Which keeps my project clean and seperated from the GUI (that whole model-view-controller thing) and really makes prototyping a GUI easy. I just hit Cmd-R to test the GUI in Interface Builder.
I still shake my head when I use the Visual Studio beta and create a form, and look at the code to see it instancing classes in an InitializeComponent() function. Anyone whose used Visual Studio before knows things can go haywire if you dare touch any of that code. You have to leave it alone or the editor gets pissy.
In Cocoa, the
I also like the way method parameters are self-documenting in Objective-C. It's easier to understand a "[something doThis:parameter1 usingThis:parameter2 forThis:parameter3]" then it is a "something.doThis(parameter1, parameter2, parameter3)".
Just my opinion, and I'm sure there are those who have valid reasons to use C#/.NET instead. But I used to be a C# guy too until I learned Cocoa. The flexible messaging system alone keeps me using it.