[Mono-dev] Mono for Symbian

[Andreas Färber]

Hello Neil,

> The work falls fairly squarely into three camps:
>
> * Creating the PAL (Platform Adaption Layer)

If by this you mean adapting the Mono build system and sources to  
compile for the target platform then this is the only priority I see  
at the moment.

> * Optimizing the CLR
> * Creating a subset of the class libraries
>
> The CLR would need definitely need a fair amount of work so that it is
> as optimized as it can be for the slow procs and low memory  
> conditions.
> The GC would need evaluating too. I'm not too familiar with the  
> Mono GC,
> but the .NET CF is a relatively simple mark & sweep GC (compared to  
> the
> generational GC in the .NET Framework). I know that the CF JIT is a
> quite special case too.

Once Mono runs at all, the GC can still be optimized, just as today  
with boehm vs. sgen.

I personally don't need a clone of .NET CF or MF, any CLI runtime  
that runs on the device would greatly simplify cross-platform  
development. To create S60 and UIQ UIs we'll need new class libraries  
anyway.

> As for class libraries, Microsoft did a really good job with the .NET
> Compact Framework. 80% of the functionality of the .NET Framework  
> in 8%
> of the footprint. That's fairly reasonable target, although it did  
> leave
> the door open for my company to step in and implement a good chunk of
> missing functionality.

...and your SDF has done a good job there. Unfortunately Microsoft  
counterpoints that effort by dropping support for e.g. Pocket PC 2002  
in .NET Compact Framework 2.0, breaking cross-platform compatibility  
for any code that uses generics.

Andreas