[Mono-list] Suitability of Mono

[Mike Christensen]

On Fri, May 20, 2011 at 5:25 PM, jmalcolm <malcolm.justin at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Mike Christensen-2 wrote:
>>
>> Are the iOS and Android Mono Frameworks that Xamarin is creating a
>> totally different code-base from MonoTouch and MonoDroid?  What has
>> become of the formerly Novell owned MonoTouch/Droid products?  Are
>> those just being scrapped completely?
>>
>> If these are going to be totally new products, will they be designed
>> similar to the Novell products (eg, will it be easy to port from the
>> Novell platform)..
>>
>
> Attachmate owns MonoTouch and Mono for Android. We do not know what they
> plan to do with them (but they have no Mono team now). I doubt they will
> just hand them over to Xamarin. Time will tell.
>
> Xamarin has said that they will create new versions of these products with
> something appearing in 3-4 months. So, I would expect perhaps six months for
> a real product. According to Miguel, the Xamarin products will be API
> compatible which just makes sense.
>
> Basically, you can use the Attachmate stuff today with the intent to replace
> it with Xamarin products when they are ready.
>
> It is a little unclear to me what Xamarin needs to re-write and what they do
> not. For example, a good chunk of MonoTouch was common with MonoMac (which
> is open source). All this common code is available on GitHub as the MacCore
> project under the MIT/X11 license. I see no reason why Xamarin could not use
> it.
>
> I think a big part of the engineering effort for MonoTouch was the full AOT
> (Ahead of Time) compilation and the selective linker. Most of that is in
> Mono proper I imagine and so should also be available to Xamarin. The LLVM
> integration to optimize the native code on iOS is also out in the open.
>
> A lot of the changes would be in MonoDevelop as well, which is also Open
> Source. I would think much of the work to support XCode4 integration would
> be in the IDE for example. Work to support intellisense for MonoTouch and
> Mono for Android would largely be in the IDE as well. Code to integrate the
> device simulators would be too. Basically, every time I think about it, I
> think of more stuff they could use. There is also all the Sliverlight on
> Android stuff they were doing...
>
> Anyway, the point is that Xamarin cannot just use MonoTouch or Mono for
> Android but, despite this, they probably do not really need to write those
> products fully from scratch either. It must sure help to have all the
> knowledge required and the ability to just use the fully designed API on
> each platform.

Great info!  Thanks..

As far as what becomes of MonoTouch (though it seems like most of the
/real/ work is part of the open source dependencies) is up to
Attachmate..  However, I could see three possible scenarios:

1) Attachmate just abandons the MonoTouch code (if they're mean)
2) Attachmate open-sources the whole thing (if they're nice)
3) Attachmate sells the IP to Xamian for cheap (if such a deal could
be worked out)..

I'm very glad to see the Mono guys are still all together - starting a
new company was an awesome idea, I'm definitely a bit jealous..  If I
had some money I'd want to help fund this effort..

Mike