[Mono-list] Mono Project - Native compiler request

[Paolo Molaro]

On 08/08/03 Jonathan Pryor wrote:
> build static libs, or anything like that.  Strictly speaking, you can't
> (well, shouldn't) copy the resulting binary between machines, as the
> binary can be machine specific.  (Right Now, it's probably safe, but in
> the future you can expect Athlon- or Pentium-specific optimizations,
> which will limit portability between architectures.)

We already do processor-specific optimizations, so it's not safe to copy
the output from --aot (when it will be safe, the file will be ignored).

> However, if you're only concerned about a *single* .net application, and
> you're willing to use mono, you could always just remove the assemblies
> that you *know* you don't require, throw everything else into a
> directory tree (with subdirectories of /bin, /lib, /etc, etc.), and
> distribute that with your application bundled with it.

Currently it's possible to build a single mono binary that includes
a set of assemblies: the assembly loader will try to load them first.
In this case, though, the LGPL requires that people should be able to
re-link the application to a new runtime, so there should be an option
for the users to also download the application separately.

> Additionally, as soon as you had a second .net application to
> distribute, you'd have to do all that again, likely requiring more disk
> space than if you had just installed the redistributable in the first
> place.

Yes. I'll note, though, that if the issue is really the size of the
runtime, mono is much smaller than the MS runtime;-)

lupus

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