Submitted by The Mono Project releases version 2.2 this week with full support for SIMD extensions being one of the more interesting features (Betanews article). The extension allows SIMD code to be accelerated above and beyond the speed of past Mono and current .NET releases. Johnathan Allen from InfoQ impresses the significance of the latest Mono release in a blog entry. “It represents something bigger; Mono is outgrowing the standard. Mono is not just playing catch-up any more, it is trying to move past the CLR in many areas. And as an open source project, they can slip in new libraries at a much faster clip than Microsoft. Instead of trying to build everything themselves, they can simply pick up mature projects like Mono. Options or the collection library C5 and include them in the standard release.”
Mono games even run on the DRMphone in some kind of static mode.
And Mono is included into Second Life.
The Open Source nature and the friendly license really make the difference in games I guess. (SIMD support is just an added bonus IMNSHO.)
I hope this finally settles any sillyness about the irrelivence of mono.
No it doesn’t. Because Microsoft still has an ace in the sleeve. And it’s written LAWSUIT all over it. If supposedly Mono becomes better than .NET (I don’t think this will ever happen, but anyway) then Microsoft will sue those who use Mono. End of story.
It’s not that Mono is irrelevant. Mono is actually useless because there is Java for portable applications.
Maybe it is useless to you, but it is certainly not useless for thousands of Windows developers who thanks to Mono have a chance to easily port their applications to Linux. Even if there may be portability issues in some cases (since Mono does not implement everything in .NET), using Mono is still a much better option than having to learn and rewrite the code in Java.
I fully agree! Even though I am not a “managed code” fan.
Or, .NET does not implement everything in Mono. 🙂
At this point mono is no more irrelevant than any other programming language or platform. I say this because I know at least a few people who like the .net platform. They toy with mono, but due to some limitation they stick with .net. I say this because as mono gets better some .net developer will choose it over Microsoft simply because they would like to support more than Microsoft’s OS.
Linux is growing. The Mac is growing. Is Microsoft’s .net available on either without mono? No. So mono’s relevance is tied to the fact that developers like .net, but want it on more than one platform.
Yes java offers that, but not every developers wants to use it. Choice. Ain’t it grand.
Not likely. MS is well aware that were it to ever to take to court an OSS project, it would unleash Patent Armageddon.
For every software patent owned by MS that OSS ‘violates’, there is one owned by an OSS-friendly company, such as IBM, Novell, Solaris, etc that MS ‘violates’. Source?
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/05/28/1…
And if Microsoft tried such a thing they would be hauled off to the EU stifling competition by prohibiting/making it difficult for companies to produce software to provide compatibility and interoperability with Windows.
These patent threats are as irrelevant as those claims by Steve Balmer over ‘stolen technology’. None of it can be substantiated, and given Microsoft’s current position with regulators – I doubt they’re going to do anything stupid anytime soon.
If fact, if the poster whom I’m replying to took the time to study, he would realise Microsoft is gradually unbundling components in favour of the customer downloading them after installing the operating system.
I cant tell if you’re being sarcastic or truly optimistic. Either way, the silliness will surely rage on.
while it’s good to see some FOSS implementation of a Microsoft thing outperform the original, it’s still not really standardized, is it ? And Mono isn’t exactly the kind of thing that is ported/portable everywhere yet…
And I just had a look at the deps for Moonlight… eh.
It has wide operating system support: Linux, Windows, BSD, Solaris.
It has wide architecture support: x86, x86-64, PPC, PPC64, SPARC, s390, s390x, Itanium, ARM and MIPS.
It runs on various interesting devices like the Wii, the PS3, the iPhone and Android and the Sansa Connect MP3 player.
It would be ironic if developers started to distribute Mono for their applications to run on Windows as well.
Related to that, another amusing question popped up into my head: Has (some) open source software reached the point where it can “Embrace & Extend” standards defined by Microsoft?
There are already Windows video games that bundle Mono, so the first part of your comment is already true 😉
Oh, and Mono has also already extended .NET in a number of ways (POSIX, Gtk#, SIMD, etc)
Edited 2009-01-23 15:05 UTC