[Mono-dev] Silverlight early implementation thoughts.

[Joshua Tauberer]

Okay, good points all around....

Michael Hutchinson wrote:
> On 5/5/07, Joshua Tauberer <jit at occams.info> wrote:
>> But the unpolished things include:
> 
> Most of these are addressed in the upcoming Google Summer of Code...

That might be why they came to mind, since I've read some of the 
descriptions before, but obviously forgot about them.

>>    mod_mono (configuration is very awkward, problems are hard to
>> diagnose, restarting the Mono process is still strange)
> 
> FastCGI ASP.NET Server
> http://code.google.com/soc/mono/appinfo.html?csaid=7D9BFE2E183364B9

Okay, I guess that would work. I don't know anything about FastCGI.

>>    Class library documentation
>>    Doc tools for independent libraries (we need a proper editor GUI)
> 
> WYSIWYG Editor for Monodoc and MonoDevelop
> http://code.google.com/soc/mono/appinfo.html?csaid=69D5900719093384

WYSIWYG is always nice, though I'm not sure that's what I have in mind.

Anyway, if as Jon says, implementing Silverlight is polishing existing 
things, then great. No complaints here.

Miguel de Icaza wrote:
 >>    Debugging (MD integration, or *some* GUI debugger)
 >
 > Yes, the issue here is that the debugger has only recently became
 > complete enough to debug applications

I didn't mean to exclude the unpolished nature of the debugger itself 
from that bullet point! :)

(...mod_mono...)
> I guess that part of the problem here is that we never defined a clear
> goal in terms of what the end-user experience was.   Auto-hosting was a
> step in that direction

Right, and the interaction of that and vhosts is still unclear to me. 
(This is besides the point, but while we're here-- I have to add a 
'MonoAutoApplication disabled' on every vhost that uses mod_mono for 
anything to work. I tried to patch this at one point, but the problem 
was exactly as you say, not knowing what the goal was and what the right 
behavior should be.)

> For a while we only had Paolo and Massi working on the JIT, a situation
> that is changing as Zoltan joins the team again, and two new JIT
> developers start in May and June.

Nice!

>>  Runtime performance
> 
> This is not for lack of trying.   

Oh for sure. I also didn't mean to imply that progress hadn't been made. 
Only that based on the benchmarks we see here from time to time, there's 
more that in theory should be possible, so it's one of many things that 
remains in the 'open issues' pile.

I try to follow the blog posts on the optimizations, but often I just 
get very confused!

>> Internal testing of the Web pipelines, by having mono-project.com run 
>> > on the Mono stack
> 
> If someone writes a MediaWiki replacement that is *compatible* with the
> MediaWiki database and rendering interface, am fine switching to it.   

Well, you know that's not going to happen. But there must be some C# 
wiki clones out there by now.

> the sake of Silverlight, for one because a lack
> of Silverlight in Linux would prevent us one day from useful content. 

We all probably thought the same thing about CAS and WPF, if not other 
three-letter acronyms.

Anyway, yeah, you guys are right that some unpolished things are being 
addressed and (apprently) Silverlight isn't a major new thing to 
implement. So all's good.

-- 
- Josh Tauberer

http://razor.occams.info

"Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation!  Yields
falsehood when preceded by its quotation!" Achilles to
Tortoise (in "Gödel, Escher, Bach" by Douglas Hofstadter)