Miguel de Icaza's blog - Latest Comments in Mono 2.0 is out! - Miguel de Icaza

Re: Mono 2.0 is out! - Miguel de Icaza

migueldeicaza — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 11:25:44 -0000

We are trying to work with other distribution maintainers to ensure that people get access to packages that have been fine-tuned for each distribution.

In the past our RPMs ended up conflicting with distribution-provided packages, or in the case of Debian, our packages had a very different partitioning than what they used.

We are now working early with distribution maintainers to ensure that relevant patches are applied upstream and that they get the source for their packages on time.

It is a transition period, but the end result will be a better distributed Mono fr everyone.

Re: Mono 2.0 is out! - Miguel de Icaza

Robert — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 17:27:16 -0000

I noticed a lot of the downloads for other platforms besides SuSE and Windows variants are no longer developed. Is that going to be continued?

Re: Mono 2.0 is out! - Miguel de Icaza

Robert — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 17:12:36 -0000

Thanks!

Re: Mono 2.0 is out! - Miguel de Icaza

j23tom — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 17:19:18 -0000

what' are those licence issues with ip[od | hone] ?

Re: Mono 2.0 is out! - Miguel de Icaza

Anthony — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 15:58:54 -0000

Get Charles Petzold's free .Net Zero book http://www.charlespetzold.c... and type in the c# examples starting from the beginning to the end of the book in your editor of choice on top of Mono. After that do the same with Jon Skeet's amazing http://csharpindepth.com/ for all the c#3.0 bits..

After that you will be there..

Re: Mono 2.0 is out! - Miguel de Icaza

Robert — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 20:36:25 -0000

First programming language...

What is the best way to learn Mono?

Re: Mono 2.0 is out! - Miguel de Icaza

Christian — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 17:45:47 -0000

When will the new generic Linux-installer be available?

It's sad that you invest time in supporting all these distros, when some people just want to get the binaries!

I even don't need an installer, but a simple tgz with all the binary files...

I always download it and strip it to the minimum for our Debian based devices. I'd really like to get it now, but was completely lost in all the rpms...
(I just wanted to extract the raw files from them)

It's not a nice experience to see pages that tell me to use update-manager I never heard of!

And there was no progess in the download server since 4.10.

It would be great if there was some progress... I don't even need any installers, I know that this is work, but just a bare download of just the binary files (I don't want to compile it myself).

Also it was confusing that somehow 1.9.2 seems to be an RC for mono 2.0???

Were is that fork?

Well, maybe it clears itself up shortly, great release, mono is simply great!! Being really open, flexbile, fast, nice to use and bringing some good things from windows to liunx making them so much better! I love it!

Re: Mono 2.0 is out! - Miguel de Icaza

migueldeicaza — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 17:07:36 -0000

Mono 2.2 will ship with the new Linear IR, and this should be out in December (see our Roadmap page for details). The new GC will come, but it will take significantly longer.

Re: Mono 2.0 is out! - Miguel de Icaza

Berti — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 16:00:26 -0000

Hi Volodymyr.

Mono already features ahead of time compilation (see Miguels blog http://tirania.org/blog/arc... ) as does .NET with ngen. But code generated with that is not faster (since it is position dependent) and can even be slower (only startup time is faster). And that is even the case for GCJ !!! It might sound strange but gcj most often is slower (!!!) than the newest java sdk versions.

(for a speed comparison between gcj and java see http://shootout.alioth.debi... )

I myself thought for a long time that code running in a virtual machine can not be executed as fast as native code. For highly optimized C++ Code this is still true and that might even hold until the end of time. But since i am not doing the usual .NET, ADO.Net, ASP.Net stuff with mono (the bread and butter stuff of the majority of companies) and do a lot of prototyping of algorithms which work on a lot of data and do a lot of number crunching instead, i have a good feeling about the speed of various implementations of languages.

Six years ago i started doing some benchmarking with raytracing and mesh algorithms in C# and C++ and compared the running time of the implementations. The result was a catastrophy. C# was about six times slower than C++ (but i have to admit at that time i had nearly no knowledge of how to program C# efficently :-) ).

Nowadays when i compare the running time of a standard not highly optimized C++ program and it's counterpart in C# i get results that show, that the C# solution reaches about 75% up to 90% of the C++ version under Microsoft Windows with .NET 3.5
(of course using SSE-Intrinsics and using everything C++ might have to offer, you might even be faster, but that alone opens possibilities which i never dreamed of)

And if you compare the quality of the code generated from the Mono C# compiler with the code generated by Visual Studio 2008 you will see that it is from a performance point of view equal. That means that the mono team has done an outstanding piece of work which they can really be very proud of. Their compiler is as good as the newest Microsoft compiler. That means, if you run a mono compiled executable on windows you won't see any difference to a Visual Studio compiled one, which is marvelous.

The code generated by the jit is still somewhat slower. From my measurements it is about 50% up to 66% of the speed you will get on .NET 3.5 on windows which is acceptable if you think about the other work the mono team has done.

The first priority for the mono team surely is api completeness, because most companies need mono for porting their Windows ADO.NET, ASP.NET application to Linux and that is clearly more important and has a higher priority. First make it work, then make it fast. And if you think about the development of gnome applications then mono applications are really a lot faster than the usual gnome python based applications (i love python and use it a lot, so nothing bad against it, but it really is noticeable slower)

But what i have seen is also, that mono gets faster and better with every release. And i am very sure that, when they have linear ir and the generational garbage collector ready the mono guys will rock .NET even more than they have done in the past.

So just wait anxiously for the next releases and you won't ask for static nativ code again :-)

They have done a great job and i am sure they will do so in the future.

Berti

Re: Mono 2.0 is out! - Miguel de Icaza

Ismael Olea — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 13:58:41 -0000

¡Felicidades!

Re: Mono 2.0 is out! - Miguel de Icaza

Volodymyr Lisivka — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 06:47:46 -0000

Is support for compilation to static native code planned? GCJ is already here and difference between mono and java byte codes is so thin, so they both can be compiled by same compiler at same time. What is problem with that - MS, patent problems, license, etc.?

Re: Mono 2.0 is out! - Miguel de Icaza

Berti — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 15:46:43 -0000

Hi Miguel! Many congratulations to you and the rest of the mono team for releasing mono 2.0.

Each version just gets better and better and i am always anxious to see the next one. I hope i can try out this version soon without recompiling the sources myself and fixing missing dependencies (i am using Ubuntu and at the moment there is no newer version of mono available, for getting mono 1.9 i used the installer version which worked just fine, but a simple sudo apt-get install would be nice). It's great to see that the C5 Generics Library, the Visual Basic 8 compiler and the new mono debugger is included in this release.

I'm eager to see whether the performance increased in the new version since i am doing a lot of graphics programming with mono/.net and the excellent tao framework shortly (something which was only possible with C++ recently and now is doable with mono). I still measure a substantial performance difference between .net and mono (depending on the operations) but it gets less and less with each version which makes me very happy and confident.

Do you know when mono will be shipped out with linear IR and the generational garbage collector ?

Off-Topic: What happened to the mono site ? It's now looks so gloomy. Where is the nice and cheerful Monkey-Jungle Theme gone ? Being a primate i miss all the monkey pictures and my jungle ;-) And the monologue page still has the old style ...

Again many thanks to you and the rest of the mono team for this great new release. It is a great piece of work and i hope you will keep going.

Cheers,

Berti

Re: Mono 2.0 is out! - Miguel de Icaza

Juan Parra — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 15:37:16 -0000

Imagino la emoción que debe generar este hito para todos los que han empujado para que esto sea realidad.
queda felicitar a todos los que han puesto su sangre y sudor en el proyecto.

gracias.

Re: Mono 2.0 is out! - Miguel de Icaza

migueldeicaza — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 11:47:53 -0000

Hola,

Estamos trabajando directamente con los empaquetadores de Debian para asegurarnos que ellos le den el mantenimiento adecuado a Mono en Debian.

Hay una lista en http://lists.ximian.com con la ifomracion.

Re: Mono 2.0 is out! - Miguel de Icaza

migueldeicaza — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 11:46:49 -0000

We will be working on this, there is now a bug in bugzilla tracking down this issue:

https://bugzilla.novell.com...

We are lagging a little bit behind on the 2.0 release (Mac packages are not up yet for example), but we will get to this as soon as the other bits are done.

Re: Mono 2.0 is out! - Miguel de Icaza

Anthony Tarlano — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 04:28:49 -0000

Please don't hesitate to start blogging about using Mono on the iPhone. I just can't wait to be able to use Mono on the iPhone!!

Specific questions to answer include; Do I have to jailbreak my phone? Will Moonlight work in the browser? Will Cocoa# work with the UI?

TIA

Re: Mono 2.0 is out! - Miguel de Icaza

Ian — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 00:30:12 -0000

I don't suppose it would be possible to make the installer *not* require admin access on windows ? This makes it very hard for those of us in a corporate environment - ie no local admin on our dev machines - to try out the new release.
At the least a tarball of the binaries would be good - I don't think there should be anything significant in the installer that really needs admin access.
thanks,
Ian

Re: Mono 2.0 is out! - Miguel de Icaza

Jose Llanes — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 20:17:06 -0000

Felicitaciones loco !!!! Un espectaculo el laburo que estan haciendo, prometo portar y testear a full mis aplicaciones .net.

Re: Mono 2.0 is out! - Miguel de Icaza

Raul — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 19:20:40 -0000

Muchas felicidades por la versión segunda de mono y por supuesto muchas gracias por el trabajo duro. Es la versión mejor como siempre ;-) y por fin mono tiene un debugger. Espero verlo en MonoDevelop.

Pero soy un poco triste que no hay soporte oficial para distribuciones basadas en Debian (¡ y hasta Enero de 2007 se reportaron 129 distribuciones basadas en Debian!). En Ubuntu la versión actual todavía es 1.2.6 que es más viejo que Matusalén. ¿ Por que no hay ningún soporte para distribuciones basadas en Debian ?

A mí no me gusta mucho el diseño nuevo de sitio web de mono. El diseño viejo era mucho más amable y tenía un diseño mucho muy distintivo.

Saludos al equipo de mono y otra vez muchas gracias por el trabajo maravilloso.

PD: Miguel, en la lista de compiladores de código abierto has olvidado a "Nemerle".

Re: Mono 2.0 is out! - Miguel de Icaza

SplendidCRM — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 17:01:08 -0000

We are constantly impressed by what the Mono team is able to accomplish. Although we have just released a version of SplendidCRM 2.1 on the PostgreSQL + Mono 1.9/Linux platform, we will add support Mono 2.0 as quickly as can. You can checkout our online demo at http://postgresqlmono.splen....

Re: Mono 2.0 is out! - Miguel de Icaza

Hugo Blanco — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 15:13:28 -0000

all right! way to go Mono team!! =DD

Re: Mono 2.0 is out! - Miguel de Icaza

migueldeicaza — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 13:02:00 -0000

We are trying to have each community maintain the packaging for platforms that are not our core platforms.

This means that we are trying to work with the Debian packagers and experts on packaging Mono on Debian; Solaris packages to do the Solaris packaging and so on.

There is a new mailing list for this: mono-packagers-list@lists.ximian.com

In the meantime, you would have to compile this yourself from source

Re: Mono 2.0 is out! - Miguel de Icaza

Glenn Block — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 12:06:33 -0000

Congratulations Miguel!

Re: Mono 2.0 is out! - Miguel de Icaza

Gabriel — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 11:22:51 -0000

The new website looks great! Congrats on the new release.

Re: Mono 2.0 is out! - Miguel de Icaza

SQLDenis — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 10:40:03 -0000

This is great news, congratz