[Mono-list] Mono Project - Native compiler request

[Simon Waite]

It's not *impossible* but, you'd still need much of the .net api included,
and I don't think you can feasibly do it. (Now watch /. post a story within
an hour of this mail showing some graduate from MIT or wherever doing
exactly
this :-)

Let's not forget there is the metadata that is stored with the attributes,
the ability to generate bytecode on the fly, and load in assemblies
dynamically.

Also, going back to the java days, I remember JBuilder building exe files
that
were tiny. But you needed the 50MB Runtime (Native DLLs) to run it!

All ngen does is pre-jit the code, much like the mono -aot does (to my
understanding of it. I'm sure that I'll be corrected if I'm wrong)

A 20Mb runtime payload is small beer these days, even the JRE is around the
20-30Mb mark.

Even disk space isn't an issue these days, it's difficult getting a sub 20G
drive now.

Finally as someone else has said, most systems (if you've windows updated
them)
should have at least the 1.1 Runtime on them, so really IMHO it's a
non-issue.

Regards,

Simon

----- Original Message ----- 
From: Jan
To: mono-list@ximian.com
Sent: Friday, August 08, 2003 5:11 PM
Subject: [Mono-list] Mono Project - Native compiler request


Hi,

I'd like to know if it's possible to develop a native compiler, e.g. similar
to ngen.exe; The resulting project would not require the runtime framework
to execute; or at least only a small subset of it - i.e. only the methods of
the runtime used are extracted at compile time and included in a new static
dll for deployment. Similar to msvcrt etc.

My concern is that to deploy a .net application you must also deploy the
runtime which carries a 20MB payload.

Regards
Jan