Mono 2.8 has been released

http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2010/Oct-06.html

by icey • 16 years ago

92 35 16 years ago

j_baker• 16 years ago

I'm glad to finally be able to use C# 4.0 and dynamic types in Mono. That's a huge improvement!

arst• 16 years ago

Funny coincidence that Mono and LLVM both had 2.8 releases on the same day, and one of Mono 2.8's new features is a stable LLVM backend.

mahmud2• 16 years ago

Any mono users here also familiar with .net? how compatible are they? What works and what doesn't? What sort of applications is mono best suited for (server backend? desktop? mobile? web front end? systems programming?)

Would be nice to dish and get real insider info.

kevingadd• 16 years ago

I've used Mono to run some of my C# server applications on a linux box. I basically copied over the exe/dll files, ran it, and it worked. In a few cases I had to fix some platform-specific things (like hard-coding the directory separator), but all the core, standard APIs worked exactly like they did on windows. In most cases I was actually able to compile my applications from source using Mono's build tools without any modification, despite the fact that I authored them in Visual Studio so I didn't have a makefile (Mono provides a handy tool that reads VS project files). The biggest question mark is in terms of behavior and performance - it's possible that you could end up with a pure .NET application that happens to depend on a quirk in the Windows thread scheduler, or use a feature that happens to perform really badly on Linux due to API constraints (asynchronous IO in .NET is a good example of this; it's designed around Windows' IO Completion Port mechanism and there isn't a good analogue on Linux).

For desktop/mobile .NET applications, it's going to be more difficult to run them on Mono since they probably rely on APIs that aren't part of the core .NET standards, like Windows Forms. Mono has implementations of some of those APIs, but they aren't complete, so those apps are going to be less likely to work without modification. A lot of desktop .NET applications also call directly into Win32 for whatever reason, so that won't work on Linux. To help address this problem, the Mono guys provide a tool that can scan .NET applications for uses of APIs/techniques that don't work in Mono, and lists out the problems for you so that you can fix them.

Anyway, from my perspective, your best bet with Mono is server and mobile applications. Server, because you have two relatively solid server stacks to choose from (Microsoft .NET + ASP.net and Mono .NET + ASP.net) and you can develop in Visual Studio or MonoDevelop while running your deployed code on commodity hardware. However, it's worth pointing out that the Microsoft garbage collector is still a bit more mature than mono's so you might face challenges getting high performance out of your apps on Linux, since your ASP.net processes will be long-lived. Mobile, because Microsoft goes out of their way to make .NET development on their mobile platforms relatively accessible, and the Mono team has made great efforts to let people build native-feeling Android and iPhone apps in C#. In both cases you won't be able to write-once-run-anywhere, but you'll be able to write your core application logic once in C# and then do mobile platform specific UI development in C# as well.

mahmud2• 16 years ago

That was excellent Kevin, I thank you much.

Also:

you have two relatively solid server stacks to choose from (Microsoft .NET + ASP.net and Mono .NET + ASP.net)

I know what you meant though :-)

SeveredCross• 16 years ago

Great summary post, but I want to add one thing—Mono just got a new garbage collector with the 2.8 release called SGen. SGen is a generational garbage collector with nurseries, a cardtable-based write barrier, a parallel mark and sweep collector (which is not enabled by default right now, but there are instructions on how to enable it).

SGen should show better performance on GC-heavy workloads, a fact demonstrated by the SGen part of http://www.mono-project.com/Release_Notes_Mono_2.8. Also, the LLVM backend can be used for yet-another-JITter, though the garbage collector I think remains SGen/Boehm (not sure on this).

icey• 16 years ago

Here is the "official" compatibility chart:

http://www.mono-project.com/Compatibility

The chart is based on 2.6, the stuff that was added today falls under the "Current Mono Trunk" section.

I'm not sure if the DLR (dynamic language runtime) is fully functional on Mono yet. The DLR is what's used to make IronPython and IronRuby run on the .Net stack. It's embedded into Silverlight, which allows developers to run Python and Ruby in the browser (assuming their users have the Silverlight plugin). Mono has Moonlight, but again, I'm not sure if the DLR is in there.

I personally see C# as an evolutionary next step from Java. That being said, languages like Scala, Clojure, JRuby (which I guess is technically a language implementation) let you get the benefits of Java without all the sucky language parts.

C# is a solid server-side language. I'm not terribly impressed with it for the web, although MVC makes it much better than it used to be (blah, webforms). There's an interesting project that was posted here recently called "Manos de Mono" that offers some variety in the web space [1]

It's also turned out to be a pretty decent mobile development language. You can develop iPhone and Android apps using Mono [2][3], as well as cross-platform games [4][5].

You can use Mono in client-side applications, but I'm not sure how well it works or everything that's involved with using it that way.

One of the nice things about Mono is that it lets you write C# on Unix and Unix-like platforms. For those of us that use C# during the day, it's liberating to be able to use the same language on our Macs at home, or deployed on Linux servers next to our other software.

[1] http://github.com/jacksonh/manos

[2] http://monotouch.net/

[3] http://monodroid.net/

[4] http://code.google.com/p/monoxna/

[5] http://unity3d.com/

peregrine• 16 years ago

I agree with your statements about webforms(double blah), I've been working on a fairly signifigant MVC2 project at work and its far better then doing the same in webforms. Microsoft is truly trying to get back into the web game and make it 'cool' to be a web dev on the M$ stack.

That said the community is still lacking. Their are plenty of motivated passionate people but they very often feel like their are just doing it to get a book deal or speaking gigs and not because they care.

Oh well.

migueldeicaza5• 16 years ago

The DLR is fully functional in Mono by virtue of Microsoft having open sourced the entire DLR under the MS-PL and Apache2 licenses, so this release contains the same DLR that you get in .NET 4.0

fauigerzigerk3• 16 years ago

C# is an evolutionary step from Java, but it gets a bigger one with every version. I would say it has diverged further from Java than Scala. I think it's become a really interesting language. Somewhat surprisingly. It seems the people around Anders Hejlsberg are somewhat of an aberration within Microsoft considering how slow other groups move.

Anyway, the most interesting feature in .NET is that its memory consumption is about half that of Java on an average application. Sometimes more. Memory constraints are what bothers me most with the other platforms I use, particularly in a hosted environment where doubling memory often means doubling overall cost.

mcculley4• 16 years ago

We are a predominantly Unix/Linux shop that has taken over a .NET project. We are doing builds with Hudson and Mono for a web application that gets deployed to IIS. Overall, everything works but there have been a few surprises.

One surprise was that debugging is hard because Mono uses a different format for debugging symbols. This means we get tracebacks with no line numbers.

The second surprise is that we have to munge resulting executables with corflags.exe to force them to run in 32-bit mode on 64-bit boxes where there are library dependencies that keep them from being 64-bit clean.

We are trying to develop using MonoDevelop but there are some weird incompatibilities with the SQL Server client library. These are not insurmountable, but it has been a hassle.

The other hassle is that MonoDevelop is terribly slow. It does not appear to be able to do incremental compiles so any change to the project results in a recompile of the entire project.

audidude• 16 years ago

Use pdb2mdb to convert your symbols from the .net to mono format. Place the .mdb's alongside your dll/exe. Then you will get files and line numbers.

sandGorgon• 16 years ago

how is the performance of Mono/ASP.net vs stacks like RoR, PHP, etc. on Linux ?

migueldeicaza5• 16 years ago

Come join us on irc, at irc.gnome.org, channel #mono and #monodev and we can give you some ideas that might improve your development pipeline.

dawkins• 16 years ago

I switched from .Net to Mono/linux for a web application and almost everything worked right away. Most of the differences I found where because of Linux: case sensitive file names and file encodings with non ascii characters.

barrettcolin3• 16 years ago

There are quirks here and there; I use mono through unity3d, so that informs the things I notice. Specifically interop with unmanaged DLLs is: well, more guesswork than I would like. For instance, Marshal.PtrToStringAnsi (function that creates a .NET string from an unmanaged char* pointer) expects UTF-8 data; best of luck deducing that from the name of the function or the documentation.

barrkel• 16 years ago

Ansi strings in Windows are encoded using the current codepage, which is an OS-level setting depending on the localization settings. Most of the time, in the Western world, it's Windows-1252 Western European / Latin-1. It indicates how string arguments to the Ansi versions of WinAPI functions will be interpreted (ending in A rather than W).

This is the way things have been done on Windows for ages, so I don't think the concept is particularly foreign to people expert enough to need interop with native libraries.

The Mono documentation[1] indicates that Mono uses UTF-8 for all string marhsalling operations, which seems pretty unambiguously documented. It's as if GetACP() returned CP_UTF8.

[1] http://www.mono-project.com/Interop_with_Native_Libraries

sshconnection• 16 years ago

Is there a packaged build of MoMa for 2.8 available? I couldn't get our code base working in 2.6 due to a few compatibility issues, but a quick once over the compatibility page looks like those issues may be resolved. Here's looking forward to testing a lot of cross platform code!

Mono 2.8 has been released

Related Stories