11 ms·

Why Mono doesn't suck

77 points by antileet 17y ago

TomOfTTB 17y ago
It's a good article though I'd go so far as to say the piece it responds to isn't worthy of a response. Take this quote... "Nothing that comes from Microsoft can be for our good and benefit. They are dedicated to our destruction and downfall. Mono has infected Gnome. Ubuntu uses Gnome. I switched to Kubuntu and am happy with it. Now Moonlight is infecting Linux." There are two parts to the Linux community. One part sees Linux as a legitimate tool they can use to bring down costs while maintaining stability. The other sees this as some kind of holy war and is really just using Linux to act like drama queens. The link here is a good defense of Mono but the people he's trying to defend it to are never going to listen.
- mishmash 17y ago
  "The other sees this as some kind of holy war and is really just using Linux to act like drama queens." No need to deride an entire class of your peers simply because their ideals are different than yours.
  - TomOfTTB 17y ago
    It's not their ideals it's that they express them in a way that's counterproductive and designed to draw attention to themselves and not participate in a discussion. Let me give you another example of this type of behavior. I personally disagreed with many of the decisions the Bush Administration made in the U.S. I have had many thoughtful discussions with people who thought differently and have, in some cases, changed their minds ever so slightly. The guy down the road from me shares my ideals but he expressed it by hanging a life sized doll of George Bush by a noose outside his garage and then eventually lighting it on fire. I assure you he convinced no one who didn't already agree with him and his actions were really just a thinly veiled cry for attention.
    - mishmash 17y ago
      Great story. Just remember, it is their ideals that give the "other half" linux to begin with. :)
    - anshul 17y ago
      The guy down the road might not have convinced anyone directly but he did contribute to your cause by making the need for discussing GWB ever so slightly stronger in your community enabling you to do what you did.
- cortesi 17y ago
  "There are two parts to the Linux community. One part sees Linux as a legitimate tool they can use to bring down costs while maintaining stability. The other sees this as some kind of holy war and is really just using Linux to act like drama queens." Do you really think that the stability, low cost and quality of Open Source software is independent of the Free Software ideology? If I was being as derisive as you are above, I'd say that I hear this argument mostly from ignorant youngsters who have been lucky enough to inherit something marvellous that their elders fought hard for, but are now in danger of squandering everything through a moronic and self-centered lack of insight. The truth is that the two things go hand in hand. Without a Richard Stallman who is idealistic and paranoid enough to worry about things like patents and personal freedom, Open Source would be in much worse shape than it is now. Without a Linus Torvalds to pragmatically build excellent software within the framework put together by the community, we would be much diminished. We need both. Open Source software is often the "best tool for the job" in a technical sense precisely because it is Free, with all that implies. I personally think that we are right to be worried about Mono. We don't need to be alarmist, but we need to be wary. It's up to the Mono community to convince people that there is no licensing danger - the best way to do this is to lobby Novell and Microsoft to officially clarify the situation.
  - gaius 17y ago
    There's an old saying, "BSD is for people who love Unix, Linux is for people who hate Microsoft".
    - cortesi 17y ago
      I've heard it, and I personally use OpenBSD much more than I use Linux. There's a whole different discussion to be had about the differences between the BSD and Linux models, and why Linux has soared and the BSDs have not. At any rate, I suspect that, despite recent fireworks on the OpenBSD mailing lists, Stallman and Theo de Raadt agree much more fundamentally about the threat posed by patents and licensing than, say, Stallman and Torvalds.
      - uriel 17y ago
- didroe 17y ago
  I thought this was the best bit: >Mono implements an international standard albeit one from a convicted monopolist. If this is a problem, why do people use C, the standard from convicted monopolist AT&T? Mono implements an improved, Free replacement for a proprietary offering. If this is a problem, why do people use GNU (which provided an improved, Free replacement for proprietary UNIX)?
  - rbanffy 17y ago
    I never realized AT&T was in a smear campaign against the use of competing C implementations. Mono implements a _subset_ of a proprietary offering that is Free (as in speech and beer). GNU is pretty much a greatly enhanced superset of AT&T UNIX.
    - nkassis 17y ago
      at&t did at one time try to paint BSD as illegal. They also sued which Microsoft has not done yet.
      - rbanffy 17y ago
        That was a funny one. In the end AT&T was suing the BSD folks for using the technology the BSD folks developed and that AT&T was using without proper acknowledgement. I can only imagine what happened at the board meeting when this was disclosed. But I get your point. Since then, AT&T got a lot more civilized. Microsoft never was.
    - uriel 17y ago
      > GNU is pretty much a greatly enhanced superset of AT&T UNIX. I know many people that would question your claim that GNU 'enhanced' the work of Bell Labs, more like the opposite, but then they were certainly not alone in that.
  - bitwize 17y ago
    Mono implements a standard from a convicted monopolist who has a stake in dominating the market the standard affects. AT&T was barred by consent decree from entering the computer industry. Unix and C were, by the standards of the day, practically given away, and AT&T couldn't use the control over these they had to unfairly outcompete other companies.
sker 17y ago
Mono has such a bad reputation. If they want to get market, they will probably have to pull a Bing, i.e. rebrand it. Unfortunately, they don't have $100m to pour into marketing.
- TomOfTTB 17y ago
  I think you miss the point. They already have market. Most Corporate Networks run on Windows Servers. What Mono does is allow those Windows shops with their .Net experienced developers to start experimenting with and hopefully integrating Linux. Without having to change the language and framework they've standardized on. In that way it gives Linux an inroad it didn't have before Mono.
  - davidw 17y ago
    Yes and no. I think that, given all the money and hard work poured into it, Mono is, relative to other languages and things out there, not as popular as it "ought" to be. Here we have a first-rate JIT compiled language that's completely free (no Java ambiguity), with a team of smart hackers behind it, and yet not that many people use it. I don't, nor do I know anyone who does, besides one of the core developers who lives here in Padova.
    - TomOfTTB 17y ago
      Well as the head of an IT department that does use Windows servers I can tell you you're right but the reason has little to do with Mono itself. Here's the thing you have to understand about corporate IT: Support is king. Unlike startups which are filled with technical people company's have only a few IT people and usually only one whose knowledge is at a high enough level to even think of editing the source of an open source project. So you need to have a support option in place. Now Microsoft has support contracts but even if you don't purchase one you can get support for $245 per incident on any Windows Server issue. Our agency of 200 computers uses this option once, maybe twice per year. Novell on the other hand offers support for Mono but it's sold in packs of 25 incidents and costs $13,000. So no matter how much Linux and Mono can save your company the outrageous support costs make it virtually unjustifiable.
dunk010 17y ago
I always thought that it was a bit of a marketing blunder naming it the same as the slang term for glandular fever.
- gaius 17y ago
  Only in the US. Everywhere else in the world calls it "glandular fever".
- Lol_Lolovici 17y ago
  Actually Mono is the short form for the correct name of the disease, not a slang term: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mononucleosis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mononucleosis
pufuwozu 17y ago
What I find silly is that a large majority of developers prefer creating applications in Flash rather than Silverlight. Flash has proved to be very hard to reverse engineer thus has very little open-source support. With Silverlight, Microsoft has sponsored Novell in creating Moonlight which is completely open-source and could be built into every browser at one stage. Yet I still read that people won't touch Silverlight because it's so proprietary and made by Microsoft!
- jsz0 17y ago
  That's probably one reason but as history proves people will stick with what is popular and has a big install base unless an alternative exists that is so compelling that there is a real incentive to adopt it and help push it as the replacement. Silverlight apparently is not catching on in that way. Even companies Microsoft paid to use it are jumping off the ship. That cannot possibly be a good sign for its future.
- ovidiu 17y ago
  Silverlight is proprietary. And it's just the same type of evil, but maybe at a lower degree (it's still based on proprietary codecs and the main implementation is not free/open source). Developers choose flash because it's much more popular and has mature tools and a significant pool of experienced professionals who can work with it. It's not only about the technical features of Silverlight compared to Flash (Silverlight doesn't really stand out), it's also about the ecosystem.
- bad_user 17y ago
  Moonlight for the moment has stability issues. I'm using version 1.9.3, which is a preview, and version 1 which is more stable is worthless since I haven't found many clips compatible with it. What I do like about it is that Microsoft supports it. The first time I installed Moonlight was because of a page that required Silverlight, and on clicking the "Install Silverlight" button, I got redirected to the Moonlight page. That's pretty neat. Silverlight has great potential, because you can reverse-engineer it more easily, has support for multiple languages and you only need a text editor to create a Silverlight clip. And in version 3 they are introducing an API for plugable codecs, which is making it possible to stream OGG/Theora and Vorbis files with a Silverlight applet. Flash is more popular because of inertia, and because many designers use Macs and have invested heavily in Adobe tools. Microsoft Expression only runs on Windows. They would have a lot more to gain if they released a Mac port.
jsz0 17y ago
I believe Linux would benefit greatly from more and better Windows ports of popular OSS applications that are common on Linux desktops. If you get people using the software the time will come when switching the OS they run on is an afterthought. Plus you gain the possible contributions of millions of Windows users who have no interest in Linux but may very well want to run good OSS software. I'm not sure this is a viable strategy with GTK or QT as the Windows implementations are subpar at best. Mono is probably the way to go if you're an OSS developer interested in creating an app for everyone to use -- not just the people who happen to accept your personal choice of operating system. Isn't that (basically) the bitch that most Linux fans have about Windows-only software? Seems silly to advocate the same solution replacing win32 with GTK or QT. While they may technically exist for Windows they are not adequate -- probably comparable to running win32 apps on Linux via WINE.
jasonkester 17y ago
"Secondly, support for Microsoft.NET is a secondary goal for Mono" Guys, you're killing me. I really want to embrace Mono, but there is this fundamental disconnect between what the Mono team think they are building and what the real world needs them to be building. Mono team, your ONLY goal should be to provide a 100% compatible .NET implementation that runs on Linux. That's it. Simply make my C# code work there, and I'll be happy. Unfortunately, the Mono team is trying to do something else entirely. They're adding new language features and trying to extend it into their own thing. And nobody outside the Mono team can understand even for a minute why they would want to do that. So here we are, 4 years into this project, and it still has pieces of .NET 1.1 that are not implemented. That means we can't use it yet. And while we're waiting patiently for a usable framework, the Mono team is off pursuing shiny .NET 3.5 functionality and inventing new functionality of their own. I mean sure, it sounds like fun and all, but us developers are still out in the cold waiting for a framework that the Mono team doesn't seem inclined to actually finish. So guys, please, I'm begging you. Quit adding new stuff. Go back and finish what you started. Get .NET working on Linux like you promised. We'll all thank you for it!
- limmeau 17y ago
  "your only goal should be" or "I want you to"? Perhaps they just want to be able to program in a decent statically-typed language with a GC and a JIT compiler and Gtk bindings?
  - jasonkester 17y ago
    That seems like a reasonable thing to want to do, and a worthy reason to split off a fork. It's certainly not worth hijacking as big or important a project as Mono to do so. Mono needs to get a direction and follow it. At the moment, they're heading in a bunch of directions at once. If they don't want to be "A .NET Runtime That Works Anywhere", then they should say as much and stand aside so that somebody else can do it.
    - bretthoerner 17y ago
      > hijacking Uh, people are giving their time to create what they need / want. Welcome to open source, right? I don't think it's possible to "hijack" an open source project. As said above: patches are probably welcome. In the end it just sounds like you want free support from a company like Microsoft/Novell without paying a dollar.
patrickg-zill 17y ago
Mono comes from the same makes-Linux-slow team as the people who "gifted" us with Gnome. Who are these guys really working for?
- wvenable 17y ago
  Python must be developed by the makes-Linux-frozen-in-time team then. And don't even get me started on KDE! If you're not running Linux as God intended, from the command line and programming only in C, you are part of the problem.
- uriel 17y ago
  I will quote Al Viro (IMHO the best Linux kernel hacker by far): Yeah... "Infinitely extendable API" and all such. Roughly translated as "we can't live without API bloat". Frankly, judging by the GNOME codebase people who designed the thing [GNOME] are culturally incompatible with UNIX.
mtomczak 17y ago
I've seen Mono used to great effect in the Unity 3D game engine (http://unity3d.com/ http://unity3d.com/). Game engines are one of those interesting spaces where speed matters quite a bit, but so does ease of modification; you want your developers to be comfortable enough to implement whatever crazy ideas are designed up for game mechanics, and you need to be able to make sweeping changes to game logic quickly. But you need those implementations to be fast as well. With its multi-language support and JIT-compiled nature, Mono seems to sit at an interesting saddle-point that makes it attractive to applications like this. It's also cross-platform compilable, which in this age of multiple consoles-plus-PC-plus-mobile platforms is extremely attractive. I couldn't tell you why they wouldn't use Java, however.
- s3graham 17y ago
  > I couldn't tell you why they wouldn't use Java, however. Visual Studio and value types come to mind.
  - cryogenic 17y ago
    Visual Studio is not a factor here, value types, delegates (aka safe function pointers), mono SIMD and C# are the factors that mono was chosen over Java. C# is more expressive and concise than Java, C# supports unsafe (pointer) operations inside unsafe blocks which is very valuable for a game engine if such a thing is required. Mono has a more powerful eventing model through the use of delegates, where the Java equivalent of using anonymous inner classes is much more syntax and runtime heavy. C# supports semantic closures and has iterators, very useful features for scripting support. Plus Mono is more open than Java, was developed by open source community, therefore was already more easy to modify than Java, which has in house developed source. My 2c.
billpg 17y ago
Mono lets me write stuff in C# to run on Linux. What's not to like?
- uriel 17y ago
  C#? There are probably hundreds of open and free languages out there better than C# that can run under pretty much any platform under the sun.
  - billpg 17y ago
    And yet, people still write stuff using C#.
omouse 17y ago
What I hate about this piece is the anti-user angle. What a fucking prick. The only reason you're writing apps or working on frameworks/languages to write apps is for the users. Maybe you should listen to them once in a while.

77 points by antileet 17y ago

It's a good article though I'd go so far as to say the piece it responds to isn't worthy of a response. Take this quote... "Nothing that comes from Microsoft can be for our good and benefit. They are dedicated to our destruction and downfall. Mono has infected Gnome. Ubuntu uses Gnome. I switched to Kubuntu and am happy with it. Now Moonlight is infecting Linux." There are two parts to the Linux community. One part sees Linux as a legitimate tool they can use to bring down costs while maintaining stability. The other sees this as some kind of holy war and is really just using Linux to act like drama queens. The link here is a good defense of Mono but the people he's trying to defend it to are never going to listen.

mishmash 17y ago
"The other sees this as some kind of holy war and is really just using Linux to act like drama queens." No need to deride an entire class of your peers simply because their ideals are different than yours.
- TomOfTTB 17y ago
  It's not their ideals it's that they express them in a way that's counterproductive and designed to draw attention to themselves and not participate in a discussion. Let me give you another example of this type of behavior. I personally disagreed with many of the decisions the Bush Administration made in the U.S. I have had many thoughtful discussions with people who thought differently and have, in some cases, changed their minds ever so slightly. The guy down the road from me shares my ideals but he expressed it by hanging a life sized doll of George Bush by a noose outside his garage and then eventually lighting it on fire. I assure you he convinced no one who didn't already agree with him and his actions were really just a thinly veiled cry for attention.
  - mishmash 17y ago
    Great story. Just remember, it is their ideals that give the "other half" linux to begin with. :)
  - anshul 17y ago
    The guy down the road might not have convinced anyone directly but he did contribute to your cause by making the need for discussing GWB ever so slightly stronger in your community enabling you to do what you did.
cortesi 17y ago
"There are two parts to the Linux community. One part sees Linux as a legitimate tool they can use to bring down costs while maintaining stability. The other sees this as some kind of holy war and is really just using Linux to act like drama queens." Do you really think that the stability, low cost and quality of Open Source software is independent of the Free Software ideology? If I was being as derisive as you are above, I'd say that I hear this argument mostly from ignorant youngsters who have been lucky enough to inherit something marvellous that their elders fought hard for, but are now in danger of squandering everything through a moronic and self-centered lack of insight. The truth is that the two things go hand in hand. Without a Richard Stallman who is idealistic and paranoid enough to worry about things like patents and personal freedom, Open Source would be in much worse shape than it is now. Without a Linus Torvalds to pragmatically build excellent software within the framework put together by the community, we would be much diminished. We need both. Open Source software is often the "best tool for the job" in a technical sense precisely because it is Free, with all that implies. I personally think that we are right to be worried about Mono. We don't need to be alarmist, but we need to be wary. It's up to the Mono community to convince people that there is no licensing danger - the best way to do this is to lobby Novell and Microsoft to officially clarify the situation.
- gaius 17y ago
  There's an old saying, "BSD is for people who love Unix, Linux is for people who hate Microsoft".
  - cortesi 17y ago
    I've heard it, and I personally use OpenBSD much more than I use Linux. There's a whole different discussion to be had about the differences between the BSD and Linux models, and why Linux has soared and the BSDs have not. At any rate, I suspect that, despite recent fireworks on the OpenBSD mailing lists, Stallman and Theo de Raadt agree much more fundamentally about the threat posed by patents and licensing than, say, Stallman and Torvalds.
    - uriel 17y ago
didroe 17y ago
I thought this was the best bit: >Mono implements an international standard albeit one from a convicted monopolist. If this is a problem, why do people use C, the standard from convicted monopolist AT&T? Mono implements an improved, Free replacement for a proprietary offering. If this is a problem, why do people use GNU (which provided an improved, Free replacement for proprietary UNIX)?
- rbanffy 17y ago
  I never realized AT&T was in a smear campaign against the use of competing C implementations. Mono implements a _subset_ of a proprietary offering that is Free (as in speech and beer). GNU is pretty much a greatly enhanced superset of AT&T UNIX.
  - nkassis 17y ago
    at&t did at one time try to paint BSD as illegal. They also sued which Microsoft has not done yet.
    - rbanffy 17y ago
      That was a funny one. In the end AT&T was suing the BSD folks for using the technology the BSD folks developed and that AT&T was using without proper acknowledgement. I can only imagine what happened at the board meeting when this was disclosed. But I get your point. Since then, AT&T got a lot more civilized. Microsoft never was.
  - uriel 17y ago
    > GNU is pretty much a greatly enhanced superset of AT&T UNIX. I know many people that would question your claim that GNU 'enhanced' the work of Bell Labs, more like the opposite, but then they were certainly not alone in that.
- bitwize 17y ago
  Mono implements a standard from a convicted monopolist who has a stake in dominating the market the standard affects. AT&T was barred by consent decree from entering the computer industry. Unix and C were, by the standards of the day, practically given away, and AT&T couldn't use the control over these they had to unfairly outcompete other companies.

sker 17y ago

Mono has such a bad reputation. If they want to get market, they will probably have to pull a Bing, i.e. rebrand it. Unfortunately, they don't have $100m to pour into marketing.

TomOfTTB 17y ago
I think you miss the point. They already have market. Most Corporate Networks run on Windows Servers. What Mono does is allow those Windows shops with their .Net experienced developers to start experimenting with and hopefully integrating Linux. Without having to change the language and framework they've standardized on. In that way it gives Linux an inroad it didn't have before Mono.
- davidw 17y ago
  Yes and no. I think that, given all the money and hard work poured into it, Mono is, relative to other languages and things out there, not as popular as it "ought" to be. Here we have a first-rate JIT compiled language that's completely free (no Java ambiguity), with a team of smart hackers behind it, and yet not that many people use it. I don't, nor do I know anyone who does, besides one of the core developers who lives here in Padova.
  - TomOfTTB 17y ago
    Well as the head of an IT department that does use Windows servers I can tell you you're right but the reason has little to do with Mono itself. Here's the thing you have to understand about corporate IT: Support is king. Unlike startups which are filled with technical people company's have only a few IT people and usually only one whose knowledge is at a high enough level to even think of editing the source of an open source project. So you need to have a support option in place. Now Microsoft has support contracts but even if you don't purchase one you can get support for $245 per incident on any Windows Server issue. Our agency of 200 computers uses this option once, maybe twice per year. Novell on the other hand offers support for Mono but it's sold in packs of 25 incidents and costs $13,000. So no matter how much Linux and Mono can save your company the outrageous support costs make it virtually unjustifiable.

dunk010 17y ago

I always thought that it was a bit of a marketing blunder naming it the same as the slang term for glandular fever.

gaius 17y ago
Only in the US. Everywhere else in the world calls it "glandular fever".
Lol_Lolovici 17y ago
Actually Mono is the short form for the correct name of the disease, not a slang term: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mononucleosis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mononucleosis

pufuwozu 17y ago

What I find silly is that a large majority of developers prefer creating applications in Flash rather than Silverlight. Flash has proved to be very hard to reverse engineer thus has very little open-source support. With Silverlight, Microsoft has sponsored Novell in creating Moonlight which is completely open-source and could be built into every browser at one stage. Yet I still read that people won't touch Silverlight because it's so proprietary and made by Microsoft!

jsz0 17y ago
That's probably one reason but as history proves people will stick with what is popular and has a big install base unless an alternative exists that is so compelling that there is a real incentive to adopt it and help push it as the replacement. Silverlight apparently is not catching on in that way. Even companies Microsoft paid to use it are jumping off the ship. That cannot possibly be a good sign for its future.
ovidiu 17y ago
Silverlight is proprietary. And it's just the same type of evil, but maybe at a lower degree (it's still based on proprietary codecs and the main implementation is not free/open source). Developers choose flash because it's much more popular and has mature tools and a significant pool of experienced professionals who can work with it. It's not only about the technical features of Silverlight compared to Flash (Silverlight doesn't really stand out), it's also about the ecosystem.
bad_user 17y ago
Moonlight for the moment has stability issues. I'm using version 1.9.3, which is a preview, and version 1 which is more stable is worthless since I haven't found many clips compatible with it. What I do like about it is that Microsoft supports it. The first time I installed Moonlight was because of a page that required Silverlight, and on clicking the "Install Silverlight" button, I got redirected to the Moonlight page. That's pretty neat. Silverlight has great potential, because you can reverse-engineer it more easily, has support for multiple languages and you only need a text editor to create a Silverlight clip. And in version 3 they are introducing an API for plugable codecs, which is making it possible to stream OGG/Theora and Vorbis files with a Silverlight applet. Flash is more popular because of inertia, and because many designers use Macs and have invested heavily in Adobe tools. Microsoft Expression only runs on Windows. They would have a lot more to gain if they released a Mac port.

jsz0 17y ago

I believe Linux would benefit greatly from more and better Windows ports of popular OSS applications that are common on Linux desktops. If you get people using the software the time will come when switching the OS they run on is an afterthought. Plus you gain the possible contributions of millions of Windows users who have no interest in Linux but may very well want to run good OSS software. I'm not sure this is a viable strategy with GTK or QT as the Windows implementations are subpar at best. Mono is probably the way to go if you're an OSS developer interested in creating an app for everyone to use -- not just the people who happen to accept your personal choice of operating system. Isn't that (basically) the bitch that most Linux fans have about Windows-only software? Seems silly to advocate the same solution replacing win32 with GTK or QT. While they may technically exist for Windows they are not adequate -- probably comparable to running win32 apps on Linux via WINE.

jasonkester 17y ago

"Secondly, support for Microsoft.NET is a secondary goal for Mono" Guys, you're killing me. I really want to embrace Mono, but there is this fundamental disconnect between what the Mono team think they are building and what the real world needs them to be building. Mono team, your ONLY goal should be to provide a 100% compatible .NET implementation that runs on Linux. That's it. Simply make my C# code work there, and I'll be happy. Unfortunately, the Mono team is trying to do something else entirely. They're adding new language features and trying to extend it into their own thing. And nobody outside the Mono team can understand even for a minute why they would want to do that. So here we are, 4 years into this project, and it still has pieces of .NET 1.1 that are not implemented. That means we can't use it yet. And while we're waiting patiently for a usable framework, the Mono team is off pursuing shiny .NET 3.5 functionality and inventing new functionality of their own. I mean sure, it sounds like fun and all, but us developers are still out in the cold waiting for a framework that the Mono team doesn't seem inclined to actually finish. So guys, please, I'm begging you. Quit adding new stuff. Go back and finish what you started. Get .NET working on Linux like you promised. We'll all thank you for it!

limmeau 17y ago
"your only goal should be" or "I want you to"? Perhaps they just want to be able to program in a decent statically-typed language with a GC and a JIT compiler and Gtk bindings?
- jasonkester 17y ago
  That seems like a reasonable thing to want to do, and a worthy reason to split off a fork. It's certainly not worth hijacking as big or important a project as Mono to do so. Mono needs to get a direction and follow it. At the moment, they're heading in a bunch of directions at once. If they don't want to be "A .NET Runtime That Works Anywhere", then they should say as much and stand aside so that somebody else can do it.
  - bretthoerner 17y ago
    > hijacking Uh, people are giving their time to create what they need / want. Welcome to open source, right? I don't think it's possible to "hijack" an open source project. As said above: patches are probably welcome. In the end it just sounds like you want free support from a company like Microsoft/Novell without paying a dollar.

patrickg-zill 17y ago

Mono comes from the same makes-Linux-slow team as the people who "gifted" us with Gnome. Who are these guys really working for?

wvenable 17y ago
Python must be developed by the makes-Linux-frozen-in-time team then. And don't even get me started on KDE! If you're not running Linux as God intended, from the command line and programming only in C, you are part of the problem.
uriel 17y ago
I will quote Al Viro (IMHO the best Linux kernel hacker by far): Yeah... "Infinitely extendable API" and all such. Roughly translated as "we can't live without API bloat". Frankly, judging by the GNOME codebase people who designed the thing [GNOME] are culturally incompatible with UNIX.

mtomczak 17y ago

I've seen Mono used to great effect in the Unity 3D game engine (http://unity3d.com/ http://unity3d.com/). Game engines are one of those interesting spaces where speed matters quite a bit, but so does ease of modification; you want your developers to be comfortable enough to implement whatever crazy ideas are designed up for game mechanics, and you need to be able to make sweeping changes to game logic quickly. But you need those implementations to be fast as well. With its multi-language support and JIT-compiled nature, Mono seems to sit at an interesting saddle-point that makes it attractive to applications like this. It's also cross-platform compilable, which in this age of multiple consoles-plus-PC-plus-mobile platforms is extremely attractive. I couldn't tell you why they wouldn't use Java, however.

s3graham 17y ago
> I couldn't tell you why they wouldn't use Java, however. Visual Studio and value types come to mind.
- cryogenic 17y ago
  Visual Studio is not a factor here, value types, delegates (aka safe function pointers), mono SIMD and C# are the factors that mono was chosen over Java. C# is more expressive and concise than Java, C# supports unsafe (pointer) operations inside unsafe blocks which is very valuable for a game engine if such a thing is required. Mono has a more powerful eventing model through the use of delegates, where the Java equivalent of using anonymous inner classes is much more syntax and runtime heavy. C# supports semantic closures and has iterators, very useful features for scripting support. Plus Mono is more open than Java, was developed by open source community, therefore was already more easy to modify than Java, which has in house developed source. My 2c.

billpg 17y ago

Mono lets me write stuff in C# to run on Linux. What's not to like?

uriel 17y ago
C#? There are probably hundreds of open and free languages out there better than C# that can run under pretty much any platform under the sun.
- billpg 17y ago
  And yet, people still write stuff using C#.

omouse 17y ago

What I hate about this piece is the anti-user angle. What a fucking prick. The only reason you're writing apps or working on frameworks/languages to write apps is for the users. Maybe you should listen to them once in a while.