[Mono-list] future of Mono

[Mike Christensen]

I, for one, after hearing that Attachmate was firing the Mono team
thought "Well crap, that's game over for Mono - that was fun while it
lasted.."

But during the past few weeks learning about the new company formed
and how all the old principals have joined, now I'm saying "Sweet this
is the best thing that could have possibly happened to Mono!" - I've
worked at both massive software giants and at small dot-com startups,
and crap simply gets done faster and better at a startup..  No more
listening to corporate VP schpeils about budget and marketing and
deadlines..  Just a bunch of smart people hacking away all day.  The
way it should be.

I've been on the fence about porting my website (www.kitchenpc.com)
over to Mono for quite some time now, as well as my build scripts,
tools and dev environment.  I think when 3.0 comes out and MonoDevelop
becomes just a /bit/ more polishes (it's so close!) then I'll finally
pull the trigger on this.  I'm so used to Visual Studio, but I think
VS2010 took a huge step backwards and MD has been progressing by leaps
and bounds..  A really solid debugger with a working immediate window,
autocomplete everywhere, and integrated script debugging is basically
what's stopping me..  Man I wish I had the time to help contribute to
that project..  Sigh.

Mike

On Mon, May 30, 2011 at 5:59 PM, jmalcolm <malcolm.justin at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> newbie_mono wrote:
>>
>> I have been considering moving to mono on linux. Without Mono , the
>> alternative is learning new languages and throwing away considerable code
>> base. the recent developlments regarding disbanding the Mono team is
>> disconcerting. I have two questions regarding mono on linux :
>>
>> 1- is there really still a future for mono-( asp.net) on linux?
>> 2- is the performance equivalent to IIS ( all other things being equal). I
>> don't really care about having all the features, but performance should
>> not be less.
>>
>
> These do not sound like flames to me. The concerns are legitimate given the
> circumstances. Let me take a stab at your questions:
>
> 1) My own opinion is that Mono will be stronger than ever in the future.
> Mono is an Open Source project using the MIT/X11 license. The commits are
> still coming in on GitHub from multiple contributors (not just the ex-Novell
> team). Oh, and about that, the ex-Novell Mono team is pretty much now the
> Xamarin Mono team (with at least one exception). The old team has started a
> new company under the leadership of Miguel de Icaza and Nat Friedman. Miguel
> has been the heart of the Mono ecosystem since the project began. Nat and
> Miguel have run a successful dev company before. The Mono team is awesome. I
> expect big things.
>
> 2) The performance is about the same in most cases in my experience. In some
> cases, .NET is faster and in some Mono is faster. In general, .NET is a
> little faster. It depends on your app. I can tell you one thing, Mono vs.
> .NET runtime differences will be dwarfed by other factors if you are doing
> web apps (database, network, memory, file system). There are differences at
> the Operating System level that will also make a difference and I think the
> performance advantage between Linux and Windows goes the other way (Linux
> being faster). People still seem to run into edge cases now and again where
> Mono falls down a bit. Be sure to report it if you run into one; the Mono
> team has been fantastic about addressing these quickly (when they are given
> enough information to dig into it at least).
>
>
> Learning new languages should be something to look forward to. Thankfully,
> both Mono and .NET provide ample opportunity for that. Of course, there are
> lots of other fish in the sea as well.
>
> Throwing away large working code bases--not so cool. One of the things that
> I love about Mono (and .NET) is the ability to keep learning and growing
> while still staying on the same fundamental platform (and being able to
> reuse old code often).
>
> The way the Mono (.NET) ecosystem weaves together is incredible. Mono
> completes the .NET picture by bringing cross-platform to the same level as
> multi-language was within the .NET framework already.
>
> I have created C# apps for the iPhone and Android that reused C# database
> and XML processing code that I first wrote for the web (ASP.NET). I have
> invested many months building ASP.NET Web Forms apps and then been able to
> evolve them using ASP.NET MVC in a deeply integrated way. I have Unix
> console apps/utilities (with pure text interfaces and/or using the Curses
> text GUI libraries) that share much of their back-end code with Windows
> Forms apps. I can write F# libraries that get used primarily as components
> of C# apps. I can write IronPython unit tests that test (and directly
> instantiate) classes written in C#. I have even used large Java libraries
> (thanks IKVM.NET) to enhance my ASP.NET projects. Code re-use is everywhere.
>
> In the same vein, I have embedded the Mono C# compiler as a component in
> otherwise purely MS .NET apps. I have also used third-party .NET assemblies
> targeted at Windows desktop coders to augment my C# web apps running on
> Linux/Apache. I am sure some of these were written by developers that have
> never given Linux a moment of thought but the assemblies still worked great.
>
> Currently, there is nowhere else I can leverage all this interoperability.
> Plus, C# is just so nice to use for most things. I am very happy that Mono
> seems to be weathering this transition just fine.
>
>
>
> --
> View this message in context: http://mono.1490590.n4.nabble.com/future-of-Mono-tp3561515p3562091.html
> Sent from the Mono - General mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
> _______________________________________________
> Mono-list maillist  -  Mono-list at lists.ximian.com
> http://lists.ximian.com/mailman/listinfo/mono-list
>