[Mono-list] Mono Roadmap.

[Miguel de Icaza]

Hello guys,

   Various people have been asking me privately how the different
pieces of the JIT engine, the compiler and the class libraries fit
together, and how these relate to the recent announcements I have been
posting every day on the status of Mono.

* A Self Hosting Environment

	A Self Hosting environment means that it will be possible to 
	develop and contribute to Mono on non-Windows platforms with 
	the Mircrosoft .NET SDK.

	Given that our compiler is written in C# and that you will
	most likely want to use C# to build your applications, this
	means that the following things must happen:

		* The C# compiler is complete and robust enough to
		  allow the ongoing development of the compiler itself
	  	  and the Mono class libraries.

		* The JIT engine is available and mature enough to run
	  	  and execute the C# compiler and the class libraries.

		* The class libraries on which the C# compiler depends
	  	  have enough functionality and are robust enough to
	  	  host the compiler.

* The C# compiler status

	The C# compiler has to go through a number of phases:

		* The compiler parses itself (April 2001)

		* The compiler can compile itself (December 2001)

		* The compiler generates correct CIL output (work in
	  	  progress, 146 out of 150 errors have been fixed,
	  	  only 4 more errors remain).

		* The compiler generates correct code for itself.

	Note that there is a difference between correct CIL output and
  	correct code.  Correct CIL output means that the code is
  	"syntactically" ok to be executed by a JIT engine.  But that
  	does not mean that the code generated is correct.  That is the
  	next phase.

* The JIT status

	The JIT engine on Intel x86 is mature enough to run pretty
  	much anything we throw at it.  It is lacking a GC engine, but
  	we are going to be deploying it in January.

	After the JIT engine becomes feature complete we will be
  	working on optimization of the code generated, for now we will
  	focus on making the VM complete (For example, there are still
  	various issues that need to be addressed, like the stack
  	waking to enable the security system, enable the GC, etc).

	For systems where the JIT has not been ported, we do provide
  	an interpreter which has also been pretty robust since October
  	this year.  The interpreter is obviously slower than the JIT
  	engine, and it is only intended to be used as a quick way of
  	running your applications on platforms where the JIT engine
  	does not exist.

	The major reason why an application would not run on Mono
  	right now is because the class libraries that they require are
  	either not present or are incomplete.

	Dietmar has a number of pending patches to go into CVS, but he
  	could not get them into CVS before he went into vacation to
  	give us a window to fix last minute problems, so those patches
  	have not made it into CVS.  They add full unicode support
  	through Glib/libiconv to Mono.

* The Class Libraries

	From the compiler perspective, the major block requires is the
  	System.Reflection.Emit API.  We have assembled enough
  	information by constructing the compiler to know all the
  	quirks that need to be implemented. 

	The current implementation can be used to generate small
  	application, but some bits are still missing.  Paolo has been
  	working on this and has done a great job, but everytime I
  	improved the compiler, I added a new dependency (not related
  	to Reflection necessarly ;-).  

	So that will be taken care of in January.  

	Anyways, there are still a lot of other classes, more simple
  	that need to be worked on.  As usual, we welcome your
  	contributions.

	Nick has a few ideas on how we can move along.  

	There are many classes that have still missing pieces or miss
  	a test suite.  And you have no idea how important is a test
  	suite.  That is what has allowed us to produce a C# compiler
  	in such a short time.  Without the test suite, we would have
  	been lost.

Anyways, I am looking forward to write my next generation set of GUI
applications using Mono ;-)

Best wishes and Happy New Year!
Miguel.