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Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

mono-project.com

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Re: Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

#241
post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what about global or static variables of value types? i mean in theory you could stack-allocate whatever you want in your main() method and pass pointers to everything, but that sounds unusably clumsy. but with global variables and/or class variables there would be no problem except for things that inherently require heap allocation by the nature of the problem

Static fields may be placed on Frozen Object Heap. The values of static readonly fields may not exist at all if the ILC's static constructor interpreter can pre-initialize it at compile-time and bake the value into binary or codegen. Tiered Compilation does a similar optimization but for all cases. This is with JIT though which is not usable in such environment. Otherwise, statics are placed in a static values array…

i see, thanks! that's exactly the information i was looking for

Re: Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

#242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh yeah I agree lack of Linux support is a major issue. Just even without it there are so many other issues I dunno that Linux support helps much.

Does it really need help? I struggle to imagine a scenario where one would consider MAUI not supporting Linux to be an issue (if we discard superficial bad faith concern) when Avalonia, Uno or, if you care about Linux as the main target, Gir.Core exist. And, at the end of the day, you have a tool with an extremely rich FFI capability so whatever is available from C you can use as well.

Sorry I clearly was not clear enough. I mean specifically an issue with MAUI itself. I agree dotnet/c# have some solid UI options cross platform at this point. MAUI however seems to be at best a mess and at worst dead in the water.

Re: Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

#243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, to be fair .NET Standard wasn't a framework, it was a standards/compatibility label and compilation target. .NET Standard includes various versions of things that MS doesn't even touch. I stopped doing .NET stuff before .NET 5 so I'm not hugely up to date with the latest shenanigans.

But….net is everything! And also nothing ! It’s a product? It’s a suite! It’s a system ! Visual Basic .net ! What ?

The ".NET" label was applied to a bunch of things at Microsoft. It was also an early name given to their social networking / IM things.

But for the last 20-ish years it's really only been applied to things related to the .NET Framework.

So, yes - Visual Basic.NET is a language - it's the language that replaced Visual Basic 6. It compiles to the Intermediate Language (IL) that the Common Language Runtime (CLR) executes. There are other languages that compile to IL, too like C#, F#.

The .NET Framework is really a bunch of libraries and tools that are packaged together.

The .NET Standard is a standard that allows you to build a library to a known set of supported libraries and IL / CLR features.

So, yes, depending on which specific part you're referring to - it's all of those.

Re: Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

#244
post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes, i know about the microsoft apt source as for building from source, i see, thanks! or maybe it's unresolved legal concerns? nobody so far in this thread has known of any, though

I found someone requesting that it be added to Debian: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/%3Ca%20href=%22bugreport.cgi... So far no one has mentioned licensing being an issue.

that's great! possibly the link you meant was https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1078132

that seems to be from only a few weeks ago though

it doesn't seem to have come up on debian-legal in the last year or so https://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/ but debian-legal is also kind of a shadow of its former self

Re: Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

#245
post #3

I have only used mono a couple times, but I am a bit confused by the wording here and it is likely because I don't know the full story of Mono. But: > Microsoft maintains a modern fork of Mono runtime in the dotnet/runtime repo and has been progressively moving workloads to that fork. Does that mean that this mono project and its associated repo and what is within the dotnet repo are not the same and could (if they h…

> Does that mean that this mono project and its associated repo and what is within the dotnet repo are not the same and could (if they have not already) diverge?

Yes, they have diverged. Just as Microsoft forked the CLR to create CoreCLR, so too has mono been forked. Features like multiple AppDomains have been removed from this fork. Here is an example pull request:

https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/pull/47955

Re: Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

#246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to be pedantic, English does have distinct words for the two connotations of free--"liberal" and "gratuitous". Although it should also be immediately obvious why those words aren't preferred either: "liberal" also has several other connotations (to the point that a "Liberal Party" could be almost anywhere on the political spectrum), while "gratuitous" tends to lean more towards "unnecessary" than "free of…

> English does have distinct words for the two connotations of free--"liberal" and "gratuitous". Sorry but no it doesn’t. These words have the other meanings you mentioned, but they don’t include either of the meanings of “free”. If you said you were giving away “gratuitous software”, native English speakers wouldn’t know what you were talking about. The only way to understand it would be to realize that those words…

"Gratuitous software" would be excessive and unnecessary software. Which I think a lot of commercial (particularly "news") websites qualify for, and "modern" websites in general. NPM makes it easy to just install something, which requires all kinds of other things, which duplicate each other, etc.

Strangely enough, I think the LaTex distribution qualifies, too. I tried to install it recently, and it wanted 1 GB of disk space! That's multiple times the size of the entire system disk when LaTeX was created...

Sooner or later a lot of the web is going to run on WASM, at which point we'll have a virtual machine running in a user program running on an OS which incompletely virtualizes the bare machine (hence why we've ended up with WASM). Extra gratuitousity if the browser is an Intel binary being run on an M* processor via Rosetta translation... Maybe eventually we'll realize that the OS needs to provide a full virtual machine, complete with window to draw in, filesystem isolation like Plan 9, etc. But, inertia will probably make it take while.

Re: Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

#247
post #67

Fun fact: Second Life, the virtual world, has an in-world scripting language called LSL, and it gets compiled to bytecode that gets run on a virtual machine. Initially, it got compiled to bytecode that ran on an in-house virtual machine, but in 2008, they switched over to compiling LSL to Mono bytecode to run on the Mono virtual machine. I wonder if that's still how it works. (I haven't been involved with SL for a lo…

It does indeed still work that way! We even still support the old, in-house VM, known as LSO2: https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/LSO

We're hard at work adding Luau (https://luau.org) as a supported language for both in-world scripting as well as client/viewer-side scripting. As a handy byproduct of that, LSL will also gain the ability to be compiled to Luau bytecode, allowing us to eventually (someday, at least) shed any need for our custom-patched version of Mono 2.6. More juicy details here: https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Lua_FAQ

Source: I work at Linden Lab. If these sorts of things excite anyone, we're hiring! https://lindenlab.com/careers

Re: Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

#248
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Microsoft has finally realized that its animus toward projects like Wine and pre-acquisition Mono was ultimately unproductive, and a net negative for Microsoft itself. I still don't trust MS's motives in general, but I think they at least recognize that Wine/Proton helps make the Win32 and DirectX APIs a sort of de-facto cross-platform standard when it comes to things like desktop gaming, and that this is a g…

>that Wine/Proton helps make the Win32 and DirectX APIs a sort of de-facto cross-platform standard when it comes to things like desktop gaming, and that this is a good thing for them. I'm not sure if it benefits microsoft in the long term, because the "backwards compatibility" features of Wine need to be implemented in Windows already as a part of the system. So in the long run wine/proton/mono will implement windows…

> there wasn't a standard executable format for linux beforehand (static? tarball of program and dynamic libraries? .deb file? AppImage? Flatpak? Higher-level language like java?).

By this logic there wasn't a standard executable format for Windows, either (static? zip archive of program and dynamic libraries? .msi file? installer program? UWP? higher-level language like C#?).

Re: Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

#249
post #224
post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes, i know about the microsoft apt source as for building from source, i see, thanks! or maybe it's unresolved legal concerns? nobody so far in this thread has known of any, though

I doubt it is due to legal concerns if Ubuntu, Fedora, and FreeBSD are all distributing their own builds.

"legal concerns" is not the same as philosophy differences.

Re: Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

#250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mono was, but newer versions of .NET run on Linux and Mac. You can install at the link below, and then making a project is just `dotnet new console` and run with `dotnet run` https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/install/linux

Is there a way to build a GUI app with .NET on Linux? Will it be cross-platform?

There was also a GTK package for Xamarin Forms which I've used https://github.com/xamarin/Xamarin.Forms/pkgs/nuget/Xamarin....

BUT That's now officially unsupported as all of Xamarin Forms is no longer supported and the MAUI replacement doesn't cover Linux nor does that look likely (MAUI is mired deep in problems due over-ambition, failure to resource and it seems a significant push in MS to use MAUI Hybrid aka web UIs within native apps).

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