[Mono-list] Platforms Mono will support?

[Jeffrey Stedfast]

On Fri, 2002-09-13 at 05:45, code wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> Is there any plan to port mono to commercial Unix platform such as HP
> Tru64, Sun Solaris?

I had started a port to Sun Solaris a while back. As far as I know, it
should still build on Solaris but the interpreter still has a ways to go
before it will actually work (fully). Mark Crichton recently submitted a
patch that added more functionality to what I had previously written,
but it's still not complete.

> 
> Another problem is that if the porting is more hardware
> architecture-relative than platform-relative? I mean, for example,
> porting Mono from x86 to PowerPC is much more difficult than from
> Windows to Linux?

Well, porting to a new architecture means having to write code to
generate the correct sequence of opcodes to call into a function of any
signature and to retrieve the return value (this is what tramp.c does in
mono/mono/arch/<arch>). After that, if you want JIT support then you've
got to do whatever is involved in that (which I'm sure is harder than
writing tramp.c for your architecture).

Porting from OS to OS generally isn't super complicated, so long as the
OS being ported to adheres to at least *some* of POSIX. Most of the
porting problems I and others (porting to Mac OS X) have run into are
pthread mutex locking calls and some socket/networking stuff, most of
which I have now wrapped so porting should be a lot easier now.

Jeff

-- 
Jeffrey Stedfast
Evolution Hacker - Ximian, Inc.
fejj@ximian.com  - www.ximian.com