[Mono-dev] Mono for Symbian

[Andreas Färber]

Hello,

> Mono on Symbian threads appeared here from time to time.
> Does anyone know the current situation, is someone still working on
> it?

I am not aware of any ongoing activity.

 From my view, the Symbian tool chain relies heavily on Windows which  
makes it difficult for large parts of the Mono community to assist  
with such a port. At least the simulation will not run on non-Windows  
so testing has to be done either on Windows or on a Symbian device  
(which does not provide a console to read assertion failures or  
exceptions). This decision needs to be made at the start of the port,  
and it's not the only open question I see:

* Does cross-compilation to Symbian need be limited to Windows  
systems or is there a way to allow this from "any" system? (there are  
some attempts of Linux/Mac ports but are they usable? see below)

* How do we integrate such a cross-compilation into Mono's configure/ 
make process? (on Windows for compiling regular apps an incompatible  
Perl-based build system is used; for other systems this would need to  
be done manually someway)

* Is Symbian OS even able to run Mono? (Posix, threading etc.)

So there is still some work to do if we want to have a Symbian port!  
Maybe the recently announced Silverlight initiative is helpful in  
creating a slim .NET Compact Framework like profile for use on memory- 
limited smartphones. But a complete port will need much more support,  
so please feel free to look into it.

I tried asking Nokia to support this effort at the time, given that  
they have started to look into additional execution platforms like  
Python, but their feedback form didn't work. ;-)

Andreas