[Mono-list] PInvoke and true portability bet Win & Linux

[Guy Murphy]

Hiyas,

[snip]
> They will likely sneak PInvoke into their dev tools
> so people naively keep writing non-portable programs.
[/snip]

Yes MS may ensure that their apps aren't portable across platform... from a
purely commeercial standpoint they'd be nuts not to.... but that doesn't
have anything to do with .NET

[snip]
> They will likely sneak PInvoke into their dev tools
> so people naively keep writing non-portable programs.
[/snip]

I think this is somewhat of an unfair characterisation. With out foundation,
and contrary to current evidence in .NET Yes MS is capable of unsavoury
practice, but lets not behave liek we're in an episode of the X-Files.

The developer writes to the library API. If Mono has implimented the API
then no probs.

Obviously if the dev dips into the Microsoft namespace then they will impact
protability, but I would imagine there will be an equivelent namespace on
the Mono side of things.... no Windows incompatible portions of the Mono
library?

.NET goes a long way to ensure portability of code... admitedly the primary
motivation for this is to allow portability across labguages, but the side
benefit of this is that it also directly addresses portability across
platforms. There's are asembly attributes available to flag the compiler to
warn you if you're stumbling into any potholes.

There's quite a few Windows developers watching Mono now.... we going to
resort to the old zealotry and try and chase them away?... I'd normaly let
this sort of thing slide, but it has crippled so many communities that it
would be a shame to see it occuring in an area that has so much promise for
Linux/Windows cross development.

Cheers
    Guy.