http://www.linuxtoday.com/developer/2009061102135OSCY

http://blog.linuxtoday.com/blog/2009/06/why-mono-is-des.html

http://nocturn.vsbnet.be/node/155

So what is your opinion of Mono? Is it "criminal monopolist technology"? Is it "anti-capitalist freetard software"? Or is it something else, a tool to bring .NET to the greater computing world?

If they could just improve the GC performance, it'd be perfect.

Sven Groot said:

I use Mono for my research work, and it's great. It allows me to develop on Windows in C# using Visual Studio, and run my project on large Linux clusters. It combines the best of both worlds for me.

If they could just improve the GC performance, it'd be perfect.

Which metric of performance in particular?

ManipUni said:

Sven Groot said:

*snip*

Which metric of performance in particular?

I have two main issues with Mono's GC:

1. It's not a generational GC. This makes the mark-and-sweep phase of every collection more time consuming than it needs to be.
2. It uses a stop-the-world approach, which means all threads are stopped during the mark phase.

I've had some app that created a lot of short-lived strings (I'm talking many millions here), and profile traces showed it spending almost 20% of its time in the GC, of which nearly 10% in the mark function (which means that for 10% of the apps execution times, all threads were suspended). That, plus the time taken to allocate all those string objects, meant I got a nearly 40% performance improvement by switching to a custom, mutable string class (I didn't use StringBuilder for reasons that aren't important right now) so I could reuse the object instances.

A proper generational GC is apparently being worked on but Mono's own people estimate it could be years before it's stable enough to move into the main branch, by which time I hope to have graduated.

Ray7 said:

Never actually run into a Microsoft bod who hates it.

 

Eh fanboys... give'em blogs & forums and they'll sure make some noise. Besides, the "anti-capitalist" part sounds more like a political/ecnomical opinion rather than something related to Mono or Microsoft.

BTW, I wrote an importer for a game and thanks to Mono it runs on OSX. Neat.

Ray7 said:

Never actually run into a Microsoft bod who hates it.

 

Me neither. Actually, all the ones I've spoked to about are very interested and eager to help...

Dexter said:

Ray7 said:

*snip*

Eh fanboys... give'em blogs & forums and they'll sure make some noise. Besides, the "anti-capitalist" part sounds more like a political/ecnomical opinion rather than something related to Mono or Microsoft.

BTW, I wrote an importer for a game and thanks to Mono it runs on OSX. Neat.

I would think MS fanboys would cheer Mono, because its a way to prove Microsoft isn't trying to control development or limit cross-platform code.

I haven't seen fanboys who think the other way.

CannotResolveSymbol said:

It's worth noting that there are popular Mono applications shipped with most distributions by default (Banshee, Beagle, F-Spot, and Tomboy are all C# apps running on Mono using GTK# for their UI).  That would seem to indicate that Mono isn't univerally hated by the F/OSS community, either.

Yeah, it's kind of funny. I think Linux uses more .NET on the desktop then Windows does.

CannotResolveSymbol said:

It's worth noting that there are popular Mono applications shipped with most distributions by default (Banshee, Beagle, F-Spot, and Tomboy are all C# apps running on Mono using GTK# for their UI).  That would seem to indicate that Mono isn't univerally hated by the F/OSS community, either.

I actually tell the non-Windows guys to get Mono to run my software. Of course, I don't test it on Mono, so I don't care if it crashs on Mono. I personally don't care much. Being a fanboy meaning understanding MS. MS is not making a fuzz, why should I? As far as I see, MS is happy with Mono bring .Net to more platforms, which is ultimatly like what MS done with Silverlight. Best of all, MS didn't spend a dim on it.

Really?  I've never once seen a MS fanboy make such claims about Mono. I'd be interested in seeing even a single such comment. More importantly, I highly doubt that such comments, if they do exist, are anything but extremely rare, while the "Free software fanboys" tirades are all too common.  You can't mention Mono anywhere on the Internet without having multiple such tirades posted in response. That says a lot to me. About the communities, not the technologies.

wkempf said:

"Microsoft fanboys hate it because it's "anti-capitalist freetard software"."

Really?  I've never once seen a MS fanboy make such claims about Mono. I'd be interested in seeing even a single such comment. More importantly, I highly doubt that such comments, if they do exist, are anything but extremely rare, while the "Free software fanboys" tirades are all too common.  You can't mention Mono anywhere on the Internet without having multiple such tirades posted in response. That says a lot to me. About the communities, not the technologies.

Well the anti-Linux fanboy or the MSFT fanboy is a pretty new thing. I don't know if they are being sarcastic, but there are plenty of places on the 'net you can find gatherings of such people. Just be careful, NSFW and all.

Bass said:

wkempf said:

*snip*

Well the anti-Linux fanboy or the MSFT fanboy is a pretty new thing. I don't know if they are being sarcastic, but there are plenty of places on the 'net you can find gatherings of such people. Just be careful, NSFW and all.

Could you point out one of these places? I haven't managed to find one of these MS fanboys who hates Mono, and I'd like to see how they justify their hatred.

"Yeah, it's kind of funny. I think Linux uses more .NET on the desktop then Windows does."

also ironically, before it was ported to Windows (but I can't get it to install on 7 for some reason ...) Tomboy was like the only Unix-exclusive app I really missed when running Windows

Fedora is concerned about Mono

Really, there isn't a problem with "widespread concerns about Mono", there's a core group of morons from the Boycott-Novell crowd who are paranoid and misinformed trying to get rid of something for what is essentially software religious reasons. Most of these people aren't even devs, they're just users who are trying to tell devs who give up their free time to work on OSS how to work.

This post summarizes pretty well why all the anti-mono stuff is just astroturfing on the part of what is really a very small group of crazies: http://www2.apebox.org/wordpress/rants/124/ (edit: didn't realize this same thing was linked in the first post)