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Why Mono doesn't suck

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Re: Why Mono doesn't suck

#41

Post by sp332 »

cschwarm wrote: post #24
cortesi wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"There are two parts to the Linux community. One part sees Linux as a legitimate tool they can use to bring down costs while maintaining stability. The other sees this as some kind of holy war and is really just using Linux to act like drama queens." Do you really think that the stability, low cost and quality of Open Source software is independent of the Free Software ideology? If I was being as derisive as you are…

> "Do you really think that the stability, low cost and quality of Open Source software is independent of the Free Software ideology?" Well, I do. Open Source is basically just Economics. An initial release of source code happens because there's often no (more) alternative usage for it. From a product point of view, it's often unfinished. Turning it into something that could have an alternative use -- such as being s…

There are many, many "rational" ways to develop software. Most of them don't scale, most of them impede progress with red tape or big egos. The Free Software ideology is one way of thinking about software development that encourages a particular set of behaviors. The behavior of developers in the Free Software community is a direct result of their ideology.

Re: Why Mono doesn't suck

#43

Post by krschultz »

cschwarm wrote: post #24
cortesi wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"There are two parts to the Linux community. One part sees Linux as a legitimate tool they can use to bring down costs while maintaining stability. The other sees this as some kind of holy war and is really just using Linux to act like drama queens." Do you really think that the stability, low cost and quality of Open Source software is independent of the Free Software ideology? If I was being as derisive as you are…

> "Do you really think that the stability, low cost and quality of Open Source software is independent of the Free Software ideology?" Well, I do. Open Source is basically just Economics. An initial release of source code happens because there's often no (more) alternative usage for it. From a product point of view, it's often unfinished. Turning it into something that could have an alternative use -- such as being s…

You couldn't be more wrong. I write FOSS software 40+ hours a week at my job and a bit more during my free time. People are not motivated by simply economics. The majority of projects are conceived by a group of people as FOSS from the start, generally as a one that will never generate money. Those that do generate revenue are the exception not the rule.

A lot of the big projects like distros, MySQL,the kernel, Apache, and Firefox are commercially supported, but no one would really use it if it was not for the thousand little pieces of glue someone wrote as their passion or hobby with no hope for getting repaid. A lot of those people are driven by ideology, some just for the fun and challenge, and few for the money.

Re: Why Mono doesn't suck

#44

Post by nkassis »

rbanffy wrote: post #38
didroe wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought this was the best bit: >Mono implements an international standard albeit one from a convicted monopolist. If this is a problem, why do people use C, the standard from convicted monopolist AT&T? Mono implements an improved, Free replacement for a proprietary offering. If this is a problem, why do people use GNU (which provided an improved, Free replacement for proprietary UNIX)?

I never realized AT&T was in a smear campaign against the use of competing C implementations. Mono implements a _subset_ of a proprietary offering that is Free (as in speech and beer). GNU is pretty much a greatly enhanced superset of AT&T UNIX.

at&t did at one time try to paint BSD as illegal. They also sued which Microsoft has not done yet.

Re: Why Mono doesn't suck

#45

Post by Nelson69 »

pufuwozu wrote: post #10

What I find silly is that a large majority of developers prefer creating applications in Flash rather than Silverlight. Flash has proved to be very hard to reverse engineer thus has very little open-source support. With Silverlight, Microsoft has sponsored Novell in creating Moonlight which is completely open-source and could be built into every browser at one stage. Yet I still read that people won't touch Silverlig…

Silly? Flash has been around for ages, they've courted, supported and won over the design community, it seems to run most places you'd want it (already) and it's not Microsoft, it has great tool integration...

It'd be nice if there were maybe 2 or 3 factors that mattered but there are probably a dozen or more reasons people uses flash over silverlight and none of them have to do with openness. JavaFX and Silverlight are late to the game and they don't do anything more, they just don't raise the benchmark in any really significant ways.

Mono and Java both have been dealing with the same basic battle for their entire existence. C has been around longer, C is what the OS is written in... At least with Python or Ruby you don't have to compile so there is some sort of experiential advantage to the developer. Mono needs to be compiled, it's not terribly slow but all VMs (err, safe runtimes) have that stigma, you can develop much more rapidly with them with fewer bugs and there are whole classes of security defects that simply don't apply and then there is the tooling but that's just not sexy enough. If you only do C, then you're more "hardcore" and how the world perceives you as an OSS developer matters more than a lot of people want to admit.

The politics of Mono probably don't matter as much as the politics of Silverlight. Most of the people that worry about mono, from my experience, aren't developers. Where the design community is the primary user of flash and they've never been served by MS before and they have been exposed to stuff like IE's extended script.

Re: Why Mono doesn't suck

#46

Post by rbanffy »

nkassis wrote: post #44
rbanffy wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never realized AT&T was in a smear campaign against the use of competing C implementations. Mono implements a _subset_ of a proprietary offering that is Free (as in speech and beer). GNU is pretty much a greatly enhanced superset of AT&T UNIX.

at&t did at one time try to paint BSD as illegal. They also sued which Microsoft has not done yet.

That was a funny one. In the end AT&T was suing the BSD folks for using the technology the BSD folks developed and that AT&T was using without proper acknowledgement. I can only imagine what happened at the board meeting when this was disclosed.

But I get your point. Since then, AT&T got a lot more civilized.

Microsoft never was.

Re: Why Mono doesn't suck

#47

Post by jasonkester »

utnick wrote: post #35
jasonkester wrote: post #21

"Secondly, support for Microsoft.NET is a secondary goal for Mono" Guys, you're killing me. I really want to embrace Mono, but there is this fundamental disconnect between what the Mono team think they are building and what the real world needs them to be building. Mono team, your ONLY goal should be to provide a 100% compatible .NET implementation that runs on Linux. That's it. Simply make my C# code work there, and…

What 1.1 things don't work? I thought they were fully 2.0 compatible? It has been quite good in my experience, obviously if you are doing windows specific things like registry or security it won't work, but that is to be expected.

Ah, but security isn't windows-specific. It's essential if you want to use anybody's APIs that require SSL (and sometimes have broken certs). And it doesn't work in Mono today.

This could possibly be fixed by now, but last I tried, the C# sample code to interact with Amazon S3 didn't run under Mono.

Re: Why Mono doesn't suck

#48

Post by h1bored »

jasonkester wrote: post #34
h1bored wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I lead a dev team in the real world, using mono for all our work, and I don't need them to do any such thing. Your definition of the "ONLY" goal for them is utter claptrap and certainly not a definition of what the "real world needs". Stop confusing your desires ("Simply make my C# code work there, and I'll be happy") with the only sane direction for them to go. I certainly wouldn't thank them for slavishly copying .…

You've piqued my curiosity. What are you using Mono for if not to run C# outside of Windows?

We're running C# code, and increasingly some F#, but not at all interested in taking desktop or web applications from Windows and dropping them onto Macs or Linux.

We're historically a microsoft shop but recently (in the last 18 months or so) have started running linux backend servers for many of our services running on EC2. If I wanted to be buzzword compliant I'm sure I could come up with some string of cloud nonsense to describe it.

We have something that looks kinda like Hadoop crossed with an app server that we can deploy components in.

I'd be happier with a solid final version of Mono.Simd rather than slavishly filling in any missing parts of older .net.

Re: Why Mono doesn't suck

#49

Post by mtomczak »

I've seen Mono used to great effect in the Unity 3D game engine (http://unity3d.com/). Game engines are one of those interesting spaces where speed matters quite a bit, but so does ease of modification; you want your developers to be comfortable enough to implement whatever crazy ideas are designed up for game mechanics, and you need to be able to make sweeping changes to game logic quickly. But you need those implementations to be fast as well. With its multi-language support and JIT-compiled nature, Mono seems to sit at an interesting saddle-point that makes it attractive to applications like this. It's also cross-platform compilable, which in this age of multiple consoles-plus-PC-plus-mobile platforms is extremely attractive.

I couldn't tell you why they wouldn't use Java, however.

Re: Why Mono doesn't suck

#50

Post by s3graham »

mtomczak wrote: post #49

I've seen Mono used to great effect in the Unity 3D game engine ( http://unity3d.com/ ). Game engines are one of those interesting spaces where speed matters quite a bit, but so does ease of modification; you want your developers to be comfortable enough to implement whatever crazy ideas are designed up for game mechanics, and you need to be able to make sweeping changes to game logic quickly. But you need those impl…

> I couldn't tell you why they wouldn't use Java, however.

Visual Studio and value types come to mind.

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