Mono Project is an Open Source implementation of the various ECMA and .NET framework technologies for Unix, MacOS X, and Windows. This version, 1.0.1, is a bugfix release.
Mono Project 1.0.1 Released
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
48 Comments
Yeah, I really don’t see that.
I happen to really like beagle, and muine, although I don’t want to see mono as a requirement for gnome or any of its core apps.
I don’t think that Microsoft will want to, or try to kill mono in the next few years. Since, like Samba, its intended to allow the two OSes to work together, or at least for programmers to be able to come from windows to linux and vice versa. Longer term isn’t really something worth talking about, even companies friendly to OSS have made trouble when they get cornered.
Just how cross compatible is it? would a .net written MS Office run under mono? would muine run under windows?
The difference is, Sun hasn’t crushed competitors left and right,
How can they, their too busy looking like idiots.
-kill Solaris X86 -> bring it back -> push linux -> fuck linux, push Solaris.
– H/W will be free and software will cost money…(a little later)….Lets say we’re going to opensource everything!
– Red Hat is proprietary. Were not!
– lets buy Novell so we can OWN linux and screw IBM.
Sun’s management is unstable. I wouldn’t trust them.
Its pretty much concrete that Evolution is going to make it into GNOME 2.8
What happens when Evolution 2.0 introduces a Mono dependency, is GNOME going to include Mono?
People who don’t code are affraid they will be forced into using Mono in the future.
How odd is that?
Anyway, I love Mono.
I don’t care if it’s from Microsoft, they’re evil, but so is Sun (on the topic of patents and all that) with their Java stuff.
Behave dude!
Mono exists whether we like it or not. Microsoft can’t do a damn thing about it -and I don’t think they’d want to-.
Suppose that the worst case scenario is, Microsoft decides to kick Mono. Suddenly C# is a trademark, so is .NET and nobody but MS can use it.
Simple: rename C#, rename .NET for .LET (whatever), the wheel is already invented.. I don’t think Michelin is paying the “wheel inventor” anything @ all. Nor is Pirelli or Firestone or Bridgestone.
.NET in itself is a paradigm, it’s a method, you can basically do the same.
Ok it wouldn’t be that easy but… it’s possible. The Open source movement is TOO powerful to be stopped by Microsoft (otherwise they’d have already done that). Imagine Gates saying: don’t use MY .NET/C# thingy…
OSS Community: yeah, sure. Go back to redmond.
So.. the point is, do you REALLY think that Mono can be stopped? nay… let ’em come!
pst: I use Visual Studio @ work… PURE M$
Even when API are clearly not cross-platform, MS binded, unflexible. No firms, nor the majority of developpers give a damn of the windows out side world. Look at games, directx control the realm, even if opengl is a really good alternative, games company and devevelopers praise unportability. Same with business apps. The promotion of flexibility, portability and extended user base is facing a near empty audience.
The presumption of having windows .net apps to run on any OS that have mono as a holy grail, is in my view only an illusion. Unclaiming portable quality software, support and consideration from software/driver(not for mono) maker and patching it with an “emulator”(because, even if it isn’t one, it will be recognize as one on windows developpers camp) will only bring mono-dependent OS as a third class system. Considering them will become pure fantasy and an economic mockery. Then all tools build for promoting multi-os developpement will be considered no more. Porting or coding software to linux will .. wait a minute, what is Linux anyway? Did winex gives any motivation to make games more portable?
If multi-os tools have a lots of advantages and still have a hard time to sell, imagine now with these advantage reduced.
Beside the fact that I consider mono as a high quality work. A proof of open source synergy with corporate strategy that give something above any expectation. I can only say, good work for that achievement.
But on the other side, I think it will bring more bad than good.
What we need to promote, is a clear, different approach of software developpement. One that promote cross platform and flexibility and will put any OS on a near equal level.
What alternative OS need, is to give a clear business advantage to company that considerer giving time and money(software/drivers/support) to them.
Why? Because it’s Microsoft? Can’t you accept if something is good? Are you afraid of what? Your argument is plain vague, you’re not going to switch just because it has the MS Flag?
Err… come on, think a little harder. Err… let’s see… because there are patents concerns? Because… MS may pull the rug under Mono any day? That’s not very hard to understand, is it (nor it’s unlikely to happen).
Victor.
I think some of the naysayers need to keep a few things in mind when they scream for people to not use Mono because MS may swoop in at any time and pre-empt or take over or monopolize or otherwise destroy their work.
Microsoft is involved in many standards bodies, including for example work on video compression standards bodies and DRM. These are all large industry communities where they are attempting to have their standards adopted for use by industry at large. Bearing this in mind, how well do you think their technology would fare if they were to destroy Mono and derail standards work? Not very well, and this would damage their other business interests, many of which are worth more than some ECMA standard. More importantly it would open the door for a competitor in other areas.
In rebuttal you may say ‘ok, so they wait for their protocols or technology to be adopted, then they derail Mono and others’. That isn’t going to work either, since people in these standards bodies will start working to replace their contribution. Standards bodies are not ‘owned’ by anyone (in some cases they are politically skewed, that is just a fact of life). So this approach helps little.
In the end all of the above can hurt their business prospects and lose them money. They haven’t figured out a way to ‘deal’ with Mono, and it is unlikely that they will. If anything it behooves them to support it in the sense of letting it be, because it keeps a door open for business prospects — i.e. they haven’t figured out a strategy to deal with open source competition yet, and so far have failed to ‘eliminate’ it.
So, next time, before turning off your brains and spouting diatribe, sit back and consider all the implications and factors at play here.
That it’s better to integrate it with the desktop. That’s the message painted on the walls. Just like dotnet. I don’t think that the Mono integration isn’t going to happen at some point, just because the pressure is so great, as it comes from many fronts: MS employees, MS supporters, MS employees’ friends, Java haters, developers that wish to simplify their jobs by using the best tools by MS, but with the chance of deploying on Linux, Novel, etc.
So, this is a terrible discussion that just drains our energy. And most of us don’t make a buck out of it, anyway. Ask yourself if you really, really need Mono. Then ask yourself if it’s not enough that you can have your Mono, but you have to make everyone else use it or have it installed by default. For example, if you are most concerned with Asp.Net, you don’t need Mono on every client.
As long as IBM is on our side, we’re fairly safe from any patent attacks. IBM owns quite a few patents that MS infringes on.
well,im easy going guy programmer who love to develop
linux apps for fun study and work.
my preferite desktop is gnome and from the last 4 months
i going to start to write simple c# apps.
well.. this environment is so cool that i can’t just immagine to develop gtk applications without it.
I think (but im not sure) that the lack of adoption of mono into gnome inerith from some hackers who work or as involved onto redhat distros. this distro already have
commited a choice (java) then simply don’t want to migrate
the entire work on something of relative new like .NET.
btw i think that if novell desktop will be a good gnome platform,well integrated with mono, and will have some awesome programs like dashboard beagle ifolder/simias,then im sure that most programmers will switch to this new environment.
PS please don’t bother me for language i know that is so ugly. thanks
>> Behave dude!
Why should I behave when I say that I love Mono?
I am _for_ Mono, I _want_ Mono, I _need_ Mono and I _like_ Mono.
Any more clear?
Gottit. We’re two. (I guess I wrote behave because I was thinking of Austin Powers…) wow..
I donn’t have to write @ 2am in the morning.
This is the trick MS is using to poisson OOS.
It is a side effect, but a useful one none the less.
Born as a way to protect MS from their own incompetence, to ease enterprise develompents so they could hurt IBM and Sun, hyped by an army of people who does’t understand computing at all. .NET is nothing, nothing but a glorified runtime, as crap as JAVA is. Its only advantage; it is directly linked to the very heart of the Win32 API, few people can see it.
MS capitalizes on the source of their power; their F***** API, they are easing access to it with .NET
MS will strike when it will hurt the most, when MONO is everywhere.
OSS is already multiplatform, OSS has the portability, not .NET, .NET only runs on top of x86 + Win32.
Get your own conclusions.
Every piece of software of any significance probably infringes on patents:
http://tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/08/05/LinuxPatents
This includes Java, designed by Sun who seems less willing than Microsoft to really open up. There are even rumours that Microsoft will open source the .NET CLR and host it on sourceforge in addition to some of their other projects already hosted on sourceforge:
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1627301,00.asp
Microsoft seems excited about Mono. They have demoed web services designed in Visual Studio and moved without recompiling to Linux (running in Mono). The .NET community in general is excited about Mono. Really the only folks I see complaining about it or saying they hate it are Java and anti-microsoft zealots. The Mono developers certainly aren’t anti-Java. They’ve even gone so far as to allow you to run your Java code on the Mono platform with IKVM.
There a bigger world out there than gnome. I’m a windows developer and I’m very glad we have mono, it provides us with a cross platform development envioronment using a modern clean language. C# is Java without the wrinkles.
Witht he new bug fix, 1.0.1, there doesn’t seem to be anything on the web site to indicate what was fixed.
Managed code is wonderful, C# is the best language out there in my opinion. I could give two craps less what half the GNOME hackers gripe about. I like Mono, i like miguel and I support the Mono team. The people that want to stay with C/C++ in GNOME and want to fork Evolution go right ahead because in the end you will not have the cool stuff that is capable through C#. This is like a Mac vs. Windows conversation, you people need to learn to chill. If the .NET Framework is so bad and you guys are so worried about patents then carry your arguments over to the dotGNU folks. Everyone seems to pick on Mono so much, we dont want to hear it. Go to those guys and see if you have better luck. Mono and .NET are here to stay, get used to it.
” OSS is already multiplatform, OSS has the portability, not .NET, .NET only runs on top of x86 + Win32. ”
Mono is a subset of .NET, when most people talk about .NET they include mono in the conversation, with that being said, Mono runs on Solaris, OS X, Linux and it can be compiled on other platforms. You can get x86-64 from CVS.
This is the trick MS is using to poisson OOS.
Yeah it must be, I mean they made Mono right ? lol.
Born as a way to protect MS from their own incompetence, to ease enterprise develompents so they could hurt IBM and Sun,
Mono was born as a way to protect MS ? How so ? MS didn’t build Mono dude.
As far as hurting IBM and Sun, um, I hope thats the plan (for ms’s sake). This is capitalism bro, not a welfare state at work.
hyped by an army of people who does’t understand computing at all. .NET is nothing, nothing but a glorified runtime, as crap as JAVA is.
Well ain’t that just a slap in the face of everyone who was/is involved in the evolution of technologies that have their roots in the early 70s. UCSD Pascal was what paved the way to Java and .net. Kenneth Bowles, Anders hejlsberg, James Gosling and countless others are well known and their contributions are considered great.
What about you ? You’re just talking shit on an internet forum. Take a seat son.
Its only advantage; it is directly linked to the very heart of the Win32 API, few people can see it.
I think you need to learn more about .net, hell you need to learn more about Win32 I’d imagine.
MS capitalizes on the source of their power; their F***** API, they are easing access to it with .NET
Actually .net is a step towards abstracting Win32, and then replacing it in the future. It will be a legacy API in time.
MS will strike when it will hurt the most, when MONO is everywhere.
Possibly. Of course they aren’t exactly a non profit group passing out cookies and coffee at an AA meeting now are they ?
OSS is already multiplatform, OSS has the portability, not .NET, .NET only runs on top of x86 + Win32.
WTF does that mean ? OSS isn’t a platform or a language. Its an idealogy and distribution system for software encompassed by different software licenses, ya know things like the GPL.
Get your own conclusions.
I’ve already drawn mine. You are an idiot.
At this moment the GNOME project is based on C and there are many C zealot GNOME hacker. It is true. And sad. If you see the C based GNOME and the C++ based KDE IMHO the GNOME is not faster, smaller or stable. But IMHO far easier write application in C++ then C. And because of easier development there are more and better KDE applications then GNOME and the users are mostly select KDE instead of GNOME. And IMHO the C# is easier way to create desktop or web application then C++ or C or PHP.
IMHO the managed code is a good idea. In long term it can be faster then C or C++ (because of the JIT can generate code to YOUR processor). With unmanaged code it is only works if you compile the source code, but it can be very long time and it works only with open source. The average desktop user never will recompile the KDE on his computer.
Patents: the software patents ara totally bad idea. If no way to kill it the linux (and smaller software companies) will dead and it is not depend on .NET. Only the big players (IBM, SUN, Microsoft) can fight with patents againtst the patents of other big companies.
@ MoronPeeCeeUsr (your nick describes you even better than your words)
>>This is the trick MS is using to poison OOS.
>>Yeah it must be, I mean they made Mono right ? lol.
I was talking about .NET and you know it, you have used a cheap excuse to make fun.
While Mono not being developed by MS it is a clone of .NET and MS will take advantage of it when it considers that is the right time to do so. They always do.
>> Born as a way to protect MS from their own incompetence, >> to ease enterprise developments so they could hurt IBM
>> and Sun, (on their “middleware” markets)
Yes, I maintain that, I’m talking about .NET
> Mono was born as a way to protect MS ? How so ? MS didn’t > build Mono dude
This was my mistake I was talking about .NET not Mono, but again it was clear that I made a mistake, everybody knows Mono is the clone, and who develops it.
But no, on you infinite wisdom and politeness you can not ask why I was writing such a wrong sentence, you had to insult me.
And yes my dear friend, all the tight integration between .NET and windows is because Win32 is under the hood, and no, MS is not phasing it out, they are expanding it.
Do you thing that MS improves DirectX just for the sake of having fun? Is DirectX what is going to power Longhorn’s desktop, .NET will act as a nice wrapper for Win32, and there lies the difference with any other runtime on any other platform.
hwin = window.open(“my window”)
hwin = window.paintpicture(<picture>)
hwin = window.doamazing3deffect(parameters)
A glorified runtime, nothing else.
Rather than creating the next language, a true successor of C++, what some people do? Clone their enemy’s uniform.
(Wow, you see a person can write without insulting others!)
Image SCO, who where funded by Microsoft remember, where they actually have a case. That is why people are worried about .NET
Patents concerns aside… does anybody gets worried about performance? Theses VM’s consumes ***lots*** of memory… if you think Gnome is already slow, just wait for the Mono-based applications…
Victor.
Performance is going down the loo except.
At least in MS’s case where everything is tightly integrated onto the underlying os user experience won’t be that bad, but in the case of Sun’s crappy VM you see what do we have, slow applications slow gui slow refresh high latency…
I would like to try it out, so I tried a pretend emerge of mono on Gentoo. It only takes mono, simple.
However, to run GUI apps, you need gtk-sharp. This is a mess:
bash-2.05b# ACCEPT_KEYWORDS=”~x86″ emerge -p gtk-sharp
These are the packages that I would merge, in order:
Calculating dependencies …done!
[ebuild N ] dev-util/indent-2.2.9
[ebuild N ] gnome-base/ORBit2-2.10.3
[ebuild N ] gnome-base/libbonobo-2.6.2
[ebuild N ] gnome-base/libglade-2.4.0
[ebuild N ] gnome-base/libgnomecanvas-2.6.1.1
[ebuild N ] media-sound/esound-0.2.34
[ebuild N ] gnome-base/gconf-2.6.2
[ebuild N ] gnome-base/gnome-mime-data-2.4.1
[ebuild N ] gnome-base/gnome-vfs-2.6.1.1
[ebuild N ] gnome-base/libgnome-2.6.1.1-r1
[ebuild N ] gnome-base/libbonoboui-2.6.1
[ebuild N ] gnome-base/gnome-keyring-0.2.1
[ebuild N ] gnome-base/libgnomeui-2.6.1.1
[ebuild N ] x11-themes/hicolor-icon-theme-0.5
[ebuild N ] x11-themes/gnome-icon-theme-1.2.3
[ebuild N ] x11-themes/gtk-engines-2.2.0
[ebuild N ] x11-themes/gnome-themes-2.6.2
[ebuild N ] gnome-base/libgnomeprint-2.6.2
[ebuild N ] net-libs/libsoup-1.99.28
[ebuild N ] gnome-base/gail-1.6.6
[ebuild N ] gnome-base/libgnomeprintui-2.6.2
[ebuild N ] app-text/opensp-1.5.1
[ebuild N ] app-text/openjade-1.3.2-r1
[ebuild N ] app-text/docbook-sgml-dtd-3.0-r1
[ebuild N ] app-text/docbook-sgml-dtd-3.1-r1
[ebuild N ] app-text/docbook-sgml-dtd-4.1-r1
[ebuild N ] dev-perl/SGMLSpm-1.03-r5
[ebuild N ] app-text/docbook-dsssl-stylesheets-1.77-r2
[ebuild N ] app-text/docbook-xml-simple-dtd-1.0
[ebuild N ] net-www/lynx-2.8.5
[ebuild N ] app-text/docbook-xml-simple-dtd-4.1.2.4
[ebuild N ] app-text/build-docbook-catalog-1.2
[ebuild N ] app-text/docbook-xsl-stylesheets-1.65.1
[ebuild N ] app-text/docbook-xml-dtd-4.3
[ebuild N ] app-text/docbook-sgml-dtd-4.0-r1
[ebuild N ] app-text/docbook-sgml-utils-0.6.12-r2
[ebuild N ] app-text/docbook-xml-dtd-4.1.2-r4
[ebuild N ] app-text/scrollkeeper-0.3.14
[ebuild N ] gnome-extra/gal-1.99.11
[ebuild N ] gnome-extra/libgtkhtml-3.0.10-r1
[ebuild N ] dev-libs/icu-2.8
[ebuild N ] dev-dotnet/mono-1.0
[ebuild N ] x11-libs/gtk-sharp-1.0
I have a KDE desktop and have -gnome in my make.conf to attempt to keep Gnome off the system.
Why does it require the entire Gnome desktop?
try the same with
“emerge -pv <PACKAGE>”
and you’ll see the useflags being used by each ebuild.
Without being 100% sure (i’m not sitting at a gentoo-system right now) I think it’s gnome-extra/gtkhtml that requires the gnome-base ebuild’s, secondly thats now even close to the intire gnome-desktop.
I was talking about .NET and you know it, you have used a cheap excuse to make fun.
No I honestly believed you were just cluelessly posting.
While Mono not being developed by MS it is a clone of .NET and MS will take advantage of it when it considers that is the right time to do so. They always do.
Ok. I won’t argue that one. Whats the point?
This was my mistake I was talking about .NET not Mono, but again it was clear that I made a mistake, everybody knows Mono is the clone, and who develops it.
Well reading your drivel led me to believe that just maybe people didn’t have a clue about what Mono was. You’ll have to forgive me if you don’t know how to express yourself in a way the rest of us understand.
But no, on you infinite wisdom and politeness you can not ask why I was writing such a wrong sentence, you had to insult me.
haha. OK Jack, you take the time to insult literally hundreds if not thousands of people by claiming that the people behind Java and .NET are clueless about computing.
Now your lil’ feelings are hurt because I was a bit hard on you ? So you can shovel it but not take it? Fair enough.
And yes my dear friend, all the tight integration between .NET and windows is because Win32 is under the hood, and no, MS is not phasing it out, they are expanding it.
Sure .net is tightly coupled to Win32, .net abstracts win32. No big surprise there.
Yes MS will be phasing it out. They aren’t going to expand .net and Win32 as the future according to MS is managed code.
Look through the Longhorn development apis. See much of anything new in regards to Win32 ? How about sample code for building applications on longhorn in anything but .net ?
Do you thing that MS improves DirectX just for the sake of having fun? Is DirectX what is going to power Longhorn’s desktop, .NET will act as a nice wrapper for Win32, and there lies the difference with any other runtime on any other platform.
You are all over the map here. DirectX has its own API and yes there is a managed interface to DirectX. Longhorn handles directX in the background, yes it wraps DirectX, as it wraps Win32. Thats what it was designed to do, encapsulate the underlying apis.
.NET IS a nice wrapper for Win32, and the reason they wrapped it is because they are going to depreciate it over time. Christ anyone who has been developing on windows since 1998 has known this and seen it coming.
A glorified runtime, nothing else.
Yep. Its been a natural progression taking place since UCSD Pascal in the early 70s.
Rather than creating the next language, a true successor of C++, what some people do? Clone their enemy’s uniform.
You mean C# ? Not everyone is out to make a successor to C++ and not everyone enjoys using a language that so easily allows you to shoot yourself in the foot.
I think there is room in this world for C++ and C#, just as there is room in this world for sandboxed runtimes like .NET, Java and whatever else the future may hold.
(Wow, you see a person can write without insulting others!)
Oh I think you covered the insults quite well in your first post.
Actually I don’t see why people think that .NET is bad. Even if it just can be used on Windows (which isn’t the case anymore).
Each company has to decide which programing language they want to offer their consumer to write applications (if I am not mistaken Apple only offers Objectiv-C bindings for OSX, aren’t they).
And to be honest. With .NET (on Windows so fare, perhaps Mono and .GNU will catch up) it easy to integreate many languages into the runtime. You can use C++ (I know, there are modifications), Eiffel, Oberon, Delphi (I think), Cobol and many more.
The greate thing with .NET is that they provide an enormouse codebase (at some places it isn’t perfect though). Accually it is sad, that Sun didn’t take the opporunity to bind the Java-Runtime to more languages and better integrate it with the desktop OS’s.
I think the greatest possibilites nowadays lie in .NET because it was designed to be integrated deep into an operating system (well I hope they designed it with that in mind).
These are Miguel’s own words from an interview with C|Net:
(to me, this is anything but reassuring)
http://news.com.com/More+than+an+open-source+curiosity/2008-7344_3-…
So what is your policy then? [on protecting Mono and its users from MS]
The moment we are made aware of an infringement on a valid patent that cannot be worked around and there is no prior art, we will remove the code. So that has been our policy. We will remove any infringing code and as a user of Mono, you will have to work around the removal of the code. So today we don’t have that because we are not aware of any infringements, but that’s the situation.
GTK-SHARP doesn’t. But whoever did the ebuild for it cleverly thought, “Hey, I’ll just slap together the rest of the Gnome bindings into GTK-SHARP, too, so instead of just being a GUI library it’ll contain every binding to Gnome that’s ever been made! It’ll be great! I won’t have to have a seperate GNOME-SHARP ebuild! Hah! I AM A GENIUS!”
Mono, unfortunately, happened to be broken on fully NPTL enabled systems.(Gentoo and LFS are fully NPTL enable distros) NPTL is the new threading library developed by Red Hat that is supposedly more robust and more scalable than its predecessor.
Has this issue been resolved? Ironically, NPTL is supposed to be extremely beneficial to VM and interpreter based frameworks, like Java and Mono. So, I was disappointed to know that Mono failed to take advantage of the library and is in fact fundamentally broken on systems compiled with that library. For, a 1.0 release, a VM shouldn’t be fragile.
the real catch with .net is this:
1. MS releases the base of .net as open source.
2. the community uses it for EVERYTHING. now every program can run in windows, as well as every other OS that runs mono.
3. MS releases .NET+(tm) with closed classes (be it office integration, directX, you name it)
4. no MS code will run on other VM other than .NET+(tm)
5. people will have to choose betwen windows, that can run everything, and other OS, that can run specific programs.
6. ???
7. Profit!
1. It is true. But the mono is not based on Rotor, it is independent development.
2. The most important OS programs can run in windows. Let see Apache, GCC, GIMP, etc.
3. And the OS community releases linux-only classes (gnome#, kde#, etc).
4. It is probably will true. But IMHO it is not a tragedy.
5. It is also true at this moment. There are far more windows application then linux.
6. Because of big common API the port of windows applications to linux will be easier. And because of the better programming language and the better API the linux-only applications also will be better.
7. Yes. Profit for microsoft, profit for community, profit for independent developer companies, profit for users.
IMHO there is only one thing to be a danger to this nice new world: the software patents. In this case M$ can kill linux. But IMHO there is a bigger risk for linux: if it is not support .NET this platform will obsolote. People will have to choose between windows, that can run every applications and it is not depend on processor type (32/64 bit, Intel/Amd/Other), and linux that can run the i32 only or i64 only binaries if you have libsomething.12.2123.212312.so and have libothersomething.43.12323.4234.so but if you have libsomething.12.2123.212313.so your application will crash or produce various dependency problems.
And other danger: there are many software patents, not only in the .NET.
Im sorry but all the gnome hackers hate mono.
take a look on mailing list and see.
“The bigger problem there is patents and patent concerns, but can we
keep that discussion seperate. Evolution right now doesn’t seem to
need Mono and if it did then a fork can (and probably would) occur”
i hope that miguel and other folks will integrate mono
on gnome.
Sorry, not all “gnome hackers” hate mono. I’d say it’s about half. One group that does not like mono, only likes non-managed code and will object to anything but C/C++. The other major opposition seems to be Red Hat, as they like Java instead.
My favorite programming language is C, because it is so easy to understand exactly how your code gets compiled and what will happen when it runs. Unfortunately the complexity of understanding/maintaining C code scales (at best) linearly with the size of the project.
On the other hand, it is not always crystal clear what is happening with your C#/Java code running in an event loop on a virtual machine. However, the realities of how your code is be run are abstracted so that you don’t really need to know. And as your project grows in size, the complexity of maintaining it stays constant, since reusing classes is so natural and well behaved (well, C# more than Java in this respect).
In conclusion, C was the perfect language to carry the GNU/Linux system through its childhood, since so many developers could understand the various slices of code. Now that our applications are reaching new levels of complexity and integration, however, it is imperative that we move to managed code to keep our momentum from slamming FOSS development into a brick wall of complexity and unmaintainability.
To those developers who stubbornly refuse to give up pointer arithmetic, I point out that after over 10 years of insisting, my 88-year-old grandpa finally purchased an answering machine
not even MS CEOs know what MS will do in the (near)? future about GNU/Linux and about .NET and in general.
As Eugenia has again and again put it: “get a lawyer to call MS lawyers and ask them to commit themselves (I guess lawyers know the way) and ask from MS to say: “We love Mono. We will not EVER say anything about patents and in general in order to harm the GNU/Linux world and the FLOSS in general”)
Until that happens (almost) nobody is happy about Mono and GNOME integration. People can use GTK# (or other) apps but it won’t become _too_ massive. (even JAVA is not the first choice for a dev in the linux world [C or C++ is])
Lastly, even Miguel is not sure what to think. Just read his opinion(s) on the swpat thing about Mono. I really like this guy (he’s smart) but one day he says: “hey, JAVA(SUN) is not better with swpat and licenses”, the other he says: “Oh .NET base is in ECMA don’t worry..” and the beat goes on
To those developers who stubbornly refuse to give up pointer arithmetic…
If you think that even enters the mind of developers when they choose a language, you need to stop the dreaming and wake up. I haven’t used pointer arithmetic in over a decade, but still use C/C++ on a daily basis. Besides, even if pointer arithmetic were enough to make to abandon C, there are dozens of other languages I could use instead without having to join the Microsoft .NET bandwagon.
there are dozens of other languages I could use instead without having to join the Microsoft .NET bandwagon.
Why? Because it’s Microsoft? Can’t you accept if something is good? Are you afraid of what? Your argument is plain vague, you’re not going to switch just because it has the MS Flag? That is, IMO, something really dumb.
You have to “Join the badnwagon” that best suits your needs; .NET works fine under windows. It’s powerful enough to build fairly complex applications, rehuse code, and still allow you to code “fast”.
Why not, then? Unless, of course, you prefer Java or C++ for some other reason (which could be valid). .NET is not “the mother of all the solutions”, but it *could* work for a specific scenario. Just because it’s Microsoft, that doesn’t mean you have to ban it. Unless, again, you hate Microsoft because it hurted you… although I don’t see how MS could have done that.
Hate to burst your bubble people but Java is just as patent encumbered as c#.
http://www.sun.com/legal/patents/
I’m saying that there’s nothing you can’t code in C# that can be written in C/C++. In fact, even pointer math can be enclosed in an unsafe{} block. Anyone who can program in C++ can program in C#, and be more productive as well.
As for the .NET bandwagon, I think that’s an ideological issue and not a pragmatic one. After all, Mono is an independent implementation of the ECMA standard. And that bandwagon is more important that you may realize. This means that FOSS has the opportunity to at once be able to run the majority of new “Windows” software natively, and also to fight against the closure of standards that enable the interoperability of competing platforms. Case law has suggested that it is illegal to take action in such a way as to prevent such interoperability. This idea resulted in the “Java mangling” settlement in which Sun forced MS to stop distributing its non-compliant JVM.
Finally, after reading the 7/15/04 edition of Linux.Ars (arstechnica.com) on Mono/GTK# or even MS’s developer documentation on C#, it is hard to argue that C# is anything but the answer to all of Java’s shortcomings and the future of (userspace) application development.
Im sorry but all the gnome hackers hate mono.
Maybe you should read planet.gnome.org
muine,beagle,dashboard,blam,etc
People love Mono. We keep hearing all this bashing from anti-MS trolls, who most of which arent even programmers.
You can be happily plugging away with your C or your C++ or your assembly or whatever the hell you want.
Mono will continue to persist because developers are using it – its a fact of life. Face it, move on; break down crying in ignorance about how awful it is; just not give a damn.
To be honest, it probably does not matter what a “non-developer” thinks about the platform, because it is the developers who decide to use it or not. Developers are using it, applications are being built on it, end-users are getting it.
Big whoop. Deal with it and move on.
Hate to burst your bubble people but Java is just as patent encumbered as c#.