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Mono Developers start their own company

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Re: Mono Developers start their own company

#71

Post by josephcooney »

cwbrandsma wrote: post #63
josephcooney wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In an ideal world, yes. But from a strategic point of view monotouch/monodroid (or whatever their new equivalents will be called) don't really help MS, it just helps developers from the MS stack port their skills to other platforms. If developer division didn't have the 'strategy tax' of being part of MS they'd probably be trying to do this themselves (re-targeting their tools to support development on alternate plat…

I thought Microsoft did help fund the project when it was part of Novel. In the end, having a healthy .net community is in Microsoft's best interest, even if there is not a direct set of sales involved.

I know they (MS) had an engineering agreement with the MONO folks while they were at Novell re:Silverlight, but I don't know of any instances where they've donated money. If you've got any links please share them.

From the Moonlight FAQ: http://www.novell.com/products/desktop/moonlight_faq.html#j

This collaboration between Microsoft and Novell is a formal engineering development program. Novell is bringing the .NET-based Silverlight framework to Mono, an open source framework for running .NET applications on multiple platforms including Linux. Microsoft is providing a version of the necessary codecs for Linux.

Re: Mono Developers start their own company

#72

Post by julianz »

mattmanser wrote: post #31
m_myers wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My first thought is to run ASP.NET on a Linux server. Also, some Gnome apps are written in C#: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mono_(software)#Software_develo...

Really? You gotta be pretty damn tight to deal with that nightmare I imagine. I'd be more inclined to guess it sees more use in shops that are .Net but want to use something like a memcached or redis server and want to write small utilities on that server in a language they know. Pure speculation though.

Fogbugz (http://www.fogcreek.com/fogbugz/) on Linux runs under Mono. We use it. It works well.

Re: Mono Developers start their own company

#73

Post by mambodog »

joeshaw wrote: post #55
bfrog wrote: post #32

I am confused by this. If attachmate let go of Mono developers clearly it felt the product has not been profitable and won't be any time soon. What investor with a sound mind would feel otherwise? Novell had already dumped millions in to it and look where they ended up.

I'm not sure you can make this assumption. Attachmate seems most interested in cutting Novell down to the bone and extracting whatever value it can from what is left. I don't see a whole lot of future growth opportunity from that company in the long term. Just because Mono is not necessarily profitable now doesn't mean that it couldn't be cultivated into a profitable company later. Mono seemed to be recently finding…

What do you mean about Unity? Unity Technologies is a separate company. Do they pay (a significant amount) to licence the tech?

Re: Mono Developers start their own company

#74

Post by mythz »

ctoshok wrote: post #64
euroclydon wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I read that today, but is that a new development from the time of the whole non-Apple-approved language kerfuffle, or have MonoTouch apps always compiled into c/C++/ObjC?

monotouch apps were never compiled to c/C++/ObjC. they go straight to native code.

or LLVM

Re: Mono Developers start their own company

#75

Post by nimrody »

praeclarum wrote: post #42
c4urself wrote: post #7

Any one have any statistics on Mono or know companies that use it, always wondered about Mono usage. What are some use cases?

My iOS app iCircuit ( http://icircuitapp.com ) was written using MonoTouch. It's the #242 grossing productivity app in the store. I know, I know, #242 doesn't sound like a lot, but it's a big store. :-) I use Mono for the ease of development (powerful language + nice IDE), the nice runtime (GC and type reflection), and the .NET libraries.

Can you say a few words on the performance of the mono runtime on iOS (relative to native ObjC apps)?

Do you call out to native Objective-c code for compute intensive tasks? Do you find the mono garbage collector limiting in performance?

I assume you're using C#, right?

Re: Mono Developers start their own company

#77

Post by tytso »

bullseye wrote: post #43
mbreese wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would also go a long way to assuage people that MS wasn't about to pull the rug out from under Mono with a patent suit. If MS was a shareholder in a company that commercializes Mono, it would be tougher (but not impossible) for them to sue.

Microsoft applied the "Community Promise" to the ECMA C# and CLI standards a couple of years ago. http://www.microsoft.com/interop/cp/default.mspx

For C# and the core language, yes. But not anything higher on the .NET stack. Novell had some patents that was able to hold Microsoft at bay. But since Novell sold off their patent portfolio, who knows?

Personally, I wouldn't touch Mono would a ten foot pole, but that's just me....

Re: Mono Developers start their own company

#78

Post by escoz »

nimrody wrote: post #75
praeclarum wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My iOS app iCircuit ( http://icircuitapp.com ) was written using MonoTouch. It's the #242 grossing productivity app in the store. I know, I know, #242 doesn't sound like a lot, but it's a big store. :-) I use Mono for the ease of development (powerful language + nice IDE), the nice runtime (GC and type reflection), and the .NET libraries.

Can you say a few words on the performance of the mono runtime on iOS (relative to native ObjC apps)? Do you call out to native Objective-c code for compute intensive tasks? Do you find the mono garbage collector limiting in performance? I assume you're using C#, right?

I can talk a little about this, I too have a bunch of apps in the appstore using MonoTouch (like Quicklytics, githubby, and a bunch of other ones for clients).

Performance of monotouch is extremely good. For 99% of what you're doing, you do not notice any performance loss at all. I've played around with disabling GC temporarily, but I haven't seen yet a reason to do that in my apps. A few of them use things like huge databases with data, creating thousands and thousands of gc'd objects, and everything works amazingly well.

Not everything can be done in MonoTouch, though. For some things you'll never get enough performance unless you go to C. You can't do a lot of things in Obj-C either. Remember, Obj-c is a dynamic language, so every method call is fairly expensive, which is not the case when you're in .NET land.

Re: Mono Developers start their own company

#80

Post by thedeuce »

tytso wrote: post #77
bullseye wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft applied the "Community Promise" to the ECMA C# and CLI standards a couple of years ago. http://www.microsoft.com/interop/cp/default.mspx

For C# and the core language, yes. But not anything higher on the .NET stack. Novell had some patents that was able to hold Microsoft at bay. But since Novell sold off their patent portfolio, who knows? Personally, I wouldn't touch Mono would a ten foot pole, but that's just me....

Well of course since you work for Google, I wouldn't expect any other answer ;p
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