Notes of Miguel’s Mono Talk at OSCON
We just released Mono 1.0
~300 contributors
high level of developer productivity because the type of project is easy to compartmentalize
"this is an open-source implementation of ECMA 334 and 335 — but that doesn’t quite convey it."
Mac OS X support was sponsored by a company that wanted embedded systems support on PowerPC. We aren’t saying what that company is until they ship their product.
Roughly 50% of contributors to Mono use Windows exclusively.
Other platforms supported: Solaris, HP-UX, AIX
"Tier 1" languages. C#, Java (IKVM), and Nemerle
Preview: VB.NET, JScript, Python.
This python implementation embeds the Python VM with the Mono runtime.
(what is the use case for this?)
this afternoon Jim at 4:30 will be giving a talk on another approach to doing Python with Mono. (IronPython — great talk, btw!)
we don’t do VB because we think it’s a great language, but because it’s our #1 request.
Intent is to ease transition from Windows to Linux development
Mono 1.0 supports .NET framework 1.1 except:
vb, windows.forms, enterprise services (transactions), installation services
We have RelaxNG extensions
Monodoc
A lot of our documentation is repurposed from ECMA documentation. ("It’s bad [as are many OSS projects in terms of documentation] but not as bad as some.")
Their Monodoc works like a wiki, they make it very easy to contribute under the MIT/X11 license.
— THIS IS AN AMAZING INTERFACE FOR CONTRIBUTING. Every software product should have this.
Within Novell, new apps are being written using Mono (not rewriting old apps)
trying to make the kernel people talk to the desktop people
City of Munich is using Linux and contributed about 50 bug fixes to Mono
If you compile a VB executable and copy it over, we’ll run it. we don’t have a native compiler for VB that is windows independent yet.
Java will JIT Java byte code or Jars and JIT it into IL and native code
20 Novell engineers
Mainsoft has a product that hooks into visual studio. they add a button that says deploy into J2ee server. recompiles dotnet code into java code and lets you run your asp.net apps on j2ee.
He showed a demo of how easy it is go internationalize gtk# apps by flipping a setting and having the whole thing appear in hebrew. somebody from the audience asked, what about Chinese? "That’s a very good question, my friend! I don’t know. But…hey, it’s Chinese."
(Monodevelop) does not generate makeconf because "that’s nasty."
Future: improve Unix, Gnome, Cocoa
Continue .NET/Java compatibility work
Improve development tools (monodevelop, mono debugger, mono documentation)
Beagle, Novell Dashboard
Bringing Google onto the desktop (we demoed this six hours before Apple did — but in Norway in front of 300 developers instead of at Moscone Center in SF)
"I would have to admit that we suck because we don’t have a debugger."
"This is probably not a problem for you because you come to oscon therefore you debug with printf, but the less manly of you would like to do this."
I have two teams working in parallel: one working toward mono 2.0 but that is far away. api not set in stone yet, so it will be a while. mono 1.1 will have some incremental features. windows.forms and vb are two.
my estimate right now (for mono 1.1) is feb. 20042005 so we’ll freeze code by end of this year.
precise garbage collector: today we use boehm, we are moving to SportsModel (mozilla’s).
SPARC v9 (64 bits) is done but didn’t make it into 1.0
Related posts:
- Go Mono! Novell bought Ximian and with it the Mono project. Last weekend at...
- Microsoft Is Set to Give Linux a Boost Through Partnership With Novell ...
- Python Madness! ...
