[Mono-list] Just a simple question

Andreas Färber andreas.faerber at web.de
Wed Mar 29 06:42:15 EST 2006


Hello Norbert,

Norbert Berzen schrieb:
> What if microsoft decides not to support the native
> executable (PE) format any longer? What if they say: "The one and only
> executable file format we support is the CLR/CLI (PE) format".
>
> What happens to mono in that case? Maybe the answer is obvious, but not
> to me. Could one of you tell me? Would it be the end of mono at windows
> platforms?
>   
Should Microsoft ever decide to discontinue unmanaged applications and
only support managed applications then hopefully any application
compiled on the Mono platform will run on that future OS. However at
least today I've heard managed (CLR) code can't be used anywhere near
the NT kernel (drivers, core services) so they cannot just dump the
whole PE format (or they would have to invent a new unmanaged format).
If they tightly integrated the CLR into the OS then some advantages of
Mono would be gone, such as the current setup overhead of the .NET
Frameworks, and the problem would be whether Mono and that future
runtime would be 100% compatible...

Given the situation you envisioned, one way for Mono to continue to
exist on that OS might be to run on top of the integrated CLR! That
would be managed code executing more managed code - pretty much how IKVM
executes Java code on Mono. ;-)

Andreas


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