[Mono-list] Mono presentation at O'Reilly.

[Miguel de Icaza]

Hello guys!

   I made a presetation at the O'Reilly Open Source conference on the
Mono project, shortly after David Stutz talked about the Shared Source
implementation of the ECMA C# and CLI that they will be releasing.

   Interesting things from David's talk:

	* The terms of that shared source license are still not ready,
          and will likely be different than those from Windows CE.

	* They expect to have something by the middle of next year.

	* He confirmed that it will just be the core of the system,
          and will contain a JIT.

   He made my life easier by explaining to the audience what the CLI
was, which was helpful as I did not have to go into too much detail on
the remaining time.

   We had a good talk about the CLI afterwards.

   The slides for my talk are available on the Mono site (I believe I
already sent a mail about this) but in case I didn't, just go to
http://www.go-mono.com, and you will find the link to the talk
slides. 

   There were some good questions, like how we will avoid patents if
there are any on the ECMA specification.  Our answer is that we will
stick to use old technologies: things that have been documented or
written about in the past in the various areas where the CLI and C#
matter: intermediate languages, standards for type systems,
traditional optimization, garbage collection in the ways that Java has
done for multi-threaded operation, traditional compiler instruction
selection.

   For those cases where we incur in a speed penalty, we will research
alternative ways to implement things to not infringe on their
patents.  This is particularly useful for those of you who are
studying and need to write a thesis, as we have a research project you
can work on.

   I also got a chance to talk face to face to Sam, and we discussed a
bit about possible ways of improving the runtime.  One thing that came
to mind is that it would be possible for someone to work on a number
of projects: retargetting an existing Java compiler (I am familiar
with Guavac, and seems good enough) to generate CIL instead of JVM
byte codes.  

   I am now flying to Ottawa for the Linux Symposium.  I will try to
make releases of the runtime, the class libraries and the compiler
on Sunday or Monday when I get back to Boston.

Best wishes,
Miguel.