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Creating .NET C# Applications for Linux

Posted by Zonk on from the expanding-your-horizons dept.

An anonymous reader wrote to mention an article on the IBM site entitled Mono brings .Net Apps to Linux. From the article: "Mono gives open source developers the programming power and flexibility to build applications for Linux while maintaining cross-platform capabilities, using a variety of .NET-compatible languages. One of the great advantages of Mono for current .NET developers is providing an easier migration path to Linux. The Mono project has a very open and active development community and provides both developer tools and the infrastructure needed to run .NET client and server applications. Perhaps the most important benefit of using the Mono architecture is that you gain language independence. Mono lets you leverage any existing code from languages supported in the .NET runtime. "

2 of 340 comments (clear)

  1. Java has language independence too! by TheNarrator · · Score: 4, Informative
    Perhaps the most important benefit of using the Mono architecture is that you gain language independence.

    This is by far the most hyped feature of C# but it's also present in Java. If you look at the large incompatibilities between Visual Basic and VB.NET you'll see that .NET is not really that language independent and that each language is really more of a "skined" version of C#.

    As far as alternative languages go in Java there are many. Among the most popular are: JRuby
    # interpreter written in 100% pure Java
    # Most builtin Ruby classes provided
    # Support for interacting with and defining java classes from within ruby
    # Bean Scripting Framework (BSF) support
    # Distributed under a tri-license (CPL/GPL/LGPL)
    Jython (Python)
    Jython is an implementation of the high-level, dynamic, object-oriented language Python written in 100% Pure Java, and seamlessly integrated with the Java platform. It thus allows you to run Python on any Java platform.

    Groovy
    Groovy is an agile dynamic language for the Java 2 Platform that has many of the features that people like so much in languages like Python, Ruby and Smalltalk, making them available to Java developers using a Java-like syntax.

    There's a lot more smaller projects like JavaScript and Rhino, Jelly, BeanShell, Tcl/Java, Sleep, ObjectScript, Pnuts, Judoscript. Some people event think there are too many alternative languages for the Java Virtual Machine.

  2. Re:let me get this straight ... by miguel · · Score: 5, Informative

    I run the Mono project, so I can speak for our goals.

    And one of our goals is to be compatible with the .NET implementation. This is part of what we do on a day-to-day basis when we write unit tests for the APIs we are implementing, when we keep track of any possible difference and we respond to bugs filed on our bug tracking system where the behavior differs by fixing the differences.

    But our goal is not limited to *only* being compatible with Microsoft's .NET. We have also grown outside of the scope of what .NET has to offer, and this is why you see a very healthy ecosystem of libraries and applications *around* Mono which are not limited to being compatible.

    We created Gtk#, the toolkit we recommend for new applications that are to be cross platform; The enhanced XML stack (Commons.RelaxNG and Mono.Xml.Ext), our extended security and cryptography stack (Mono.Security), our extended Database support (Mono.Data and all of the providers for proprietary and open source databases), our IL manipulation library (Cecil) and everything that goes with these libraries.

    We try to make our libraries cross-platform, because the same code will reach more users and helps grow our community, but every once in a while we have to create OS-specific libraries. For example, the Mono.Posix library is not completely portable to Windows. The Cocoa# library only works on MacOS X, as it is designed to be just an interface to Cocoa.

    Miguel.