[Mono-dev] Building Mono on Linux/Alpha

[Jonathan Pryor]

On Fri, 2006-01-20 at 20:27 +0300, Sergey Tikhonov wrote:
> Well, it it really pity since it seem that even this "unsupported" 
> interpretator does a lot of work and give chance other arches
> to try Mono. :) Ok, I will see if I could find what the problem is....

The problem is that it's impossible to have a 100% portable interpreter,
because of  internal calls and P/Invoke.  Both of these invoke native
code, either within the runtime itself or within a shared library, and
this requires processor-specific code to place parameters in the correct
registers, etc.

Since processor-specific code is required *anyway*, it was considered
reasonable to just require the JIT for most uses, since (afaik) the JIT
doesn't require _much_ more custom code than the marshaling code already
required...

 - Jon