[Mono-dev] Guestimates for effort to port Mono to game console?

[William Howe-Lott]

Hello All.

Can anyone give me a guestimate on the effort to port the mono runtime
to an embedded PowerPC system (Wii and maybe even 360 if MS's 360 CLR
doesn't stack up) and/or any hints as to what that would entail?  We are
considering going this route so that we could use C# for the scripting
needs in our games instead of Lua (what we are currently using and
finding quite unsatisfactory) or a hypothetical home-brew dynamic
language.  I've read through http://www.mono-project.com/Porting and
everything it says sounds straight forward, but the sentence "If the OS
doesn't support POSIX and the standard libc calls, you'll likely have to
make changes in many places" has me concerned.  Not only does the Wii
lack posix support for things like disk IO, it doesn't even have a
harddrive.  Ideally, what we would end up with is a tool chain running
under Windows that can build native Wii code out of a (restricted
subset) of a CLR assembly and statically link that with a Wii port of
the runtime.  No JIT, no dynamic loading of assemblies, etc.

I realize that this is a absurdly open-ended question, but it's the
question I need to come up with an answer to.  Even responses along the
lines of "that's phycho -- it would take man-years" or "a smart dude w/
compiler and language runtime experience could pull it off in a
couple-three months" would be helpful.

Thanks,

-William Howe-Lott
Gas Powered Games