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The Case For Supporting and Using Mono
snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister argues in favor of Mono, asking those among the open source community who have 'variously described Mono as a trap, a kludge, or simply a waste of effort' to look past Miguel de Icaza and Mono's associations with Microsoft and give the open source implementation of .Net a second chance, as he himself has, having predicted Mono's demise at the hands of open source Java in 2006. Far from being just a clone of .Net for Linux, McAllister argues, Mono has been 'expanding its presence into exciting and unexpected new niches.' And for those who argue that 'developing open-source software based on Microsoft technologies is like walking into a lion's den,' McAllister suggests taking a look at the direction Mono is heading. The more Mono evolves, the less likely Microsoft is to use patent claims or some other dirty trick to bring down the platform."
Learn and master C, as above is saying! Seriously, I try hard as possible to stay away from .NET/Mono/Java/bytecode apps as much as possible. Why? Speed, obviously!
The worse argument I have seen is that when we have computers that are faster in the future, the speed will not be a problem.
I will always prefer to program in C (or C++) and have the program be native. I am very supportive of the GCJ project, which turns Java source into native. Soon Swing will be implemented, making the case for using bytecode INCREDIBLY impossible to justify. Mono should do this with C# and the like. I do not even see why Microsoft did not do this anyway. All it involves is making new libraries. What is the difference in making C# native as making MFC API native back in 96? Instead we get more bloat. How does this make any sense?
I have much better things to do than wait for Java AND your app to initialise. Furthermore, I have better things to do than wait for Java AND your app to de-initialise at exit. Same goes for .NET and Mono.