The Mono Mystery That Wasn't

jammag writes "It was shocking news, or so it seemed: Miguel de Icaza, the Mono creator, was switching his opinion about his life's work — he now seemed to agree with the free software partisans who oppose his Mono work and his Microsoft connections. The story flamed across the Internet and even got picked up on Slashdot. But Bruce Byfield reports that 'De Icaza has not changed his opinions.' De Icaza calls the rumors 'a storm in a teacup.' Tracing the misinformation trail, Byfield concludes that 'the FOSS community excels at communication. However, in this instance, that ability was used irresponsibly.'"

Comments

Re:Inflamatory headling superceeds mundane content

[miguel]

We have announced that our upcoming Mono release (2.8) will default to 4.0:

http://www.mono-project.com/Roadmap

For the first time in Mono's history our C# compiler and its supporting engine and core libraries were done before Microsoft released the product, we were usually one to two years behind. This time we are some five months ahead of time:

http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2009/Dec-09.html

There are still a handful of loose ends here and there, but luckily, nothing major.

Re:-1 Misses the point

[Andy Dodd]

"Miguel at the time argued that the free software world had failed to produce any real competitor to Java or .NET style frameworks despite their absolute dominance of mainstream programming."

Why would they need to? While initially some of the Java trademark and licensing mechanism were semi-unfriendly to open source, the situation was a LOT better than it has ever been with .NET, and is much better now.

Instead of trying to create a competitor, the OSS community worked with Java - A lot of Java's success can likely be attributed to the participation of the OSS community. (Heck, even Miguel's blog article effectively says this with his citations of various OSS "research" projects into JIT that became mainstream.)

Re:-1 Misses the point

[binarylarry]

Run fast, support multiple languages, provide 99.9999% secure code environments, support more than one thread executing at a time, etc, etc.

But... Java and Python are two drastically different technologies. Python is great at what it does but it's a scripting language not a virtual platform like Java. .NET is more comparable to Java since .NET was basically cloned feature for feature from Java with some additional features added.

Re:-1 Misses the point

[binarylarry]

Java's virtual machine (specially Sun/OpenJDK) is much more advanced than Python's (CPython).

Python takes a bytecode and then executes the one or more native instructions it takes to fulfill the purpose of the bytecode instruction. And that's basically all it does.

Java takes the bytecode instruction and compiles into a native format and uses thats for future executions. In addition, it does many other types of optimizations to increase the execution speed. You can run Java in a purely interpreted mode like Python does, pass the -Xint argument on the command line to the java instance. You'll notice it's 10000x slower than the optimized execution paths.

Java's class library is primarily Java code, whereas Python wraps native libraries for much of this work. Both methods have their pros and cons, but it means Python can be prone to more issues regarding different system libraries, etc. Since Java provides it's own virtual platform with most of the code in Java, you don't have these issues as often.

Java also allows for true threading, whereas Python threads are limited by the global interpreter lock preventing you from getting real performance gains from asynchronous execution. You have to resort to multiple python processes to take advantage of multicore processors for example.

Re:Who cares about core libraries?

[D4MO]

Visual Studio 2010, a core flagship MS product, is written in WPF.