Mono [LWN.net]

Mono

Posted Oct 21, 2004 6:10 UTC (Thu) by ncm (subscriber, #165)
In reply to: A couple of applications from your future desktop by simon_kitching
Parent article: A couple of applications from your future desktop

Maybe Mono is handy for prototyping, but these things should be re-implemented in a real language before trying to deploy them. There's nothing like depending on an unstable, immature execution environment to brand a program as buggy, slow, piggy, etc. (Witness Freenet!) Rewriting in modern C++ on libgnomemm ought to be easy, instructive, and maybe even fun.

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Mono

Posted Oct 21, 2004 8:03 UTC (Thu) by walles (subscriber, #954) [Link]

On the other hand, the only way to turn Mono into a stable, mature runtime environment is for people to develop apps on top of it, find problems with it and have them fixed.

Even gcc wasn't very good to begin with.

Mono

Posted Oct 21, 2004 8:21 UTC (Thu) by ca9mbu (subscriber, #11098) [Link]

> On the other hand, the only way to turn Mono into a stable, mature runtime
> environment is for people to develop apps on top of it, find problems with
> it and have them fixed.

Which is why this quote from the original article:

> Among other things, it seems there are memory leak problems in Mono which
> have to be worked around

strikes me as very odd. Why work around the problem at all? If the guys developing beagle have found a memory leak, why can't they report it and have it fixed upstream so it can be fixed and they don't need to work around it at all?

Mono

Posted Oct 21, 2004 22:51 UTC (Thu) by massimiliano (subscriber, #3048) [Link]

In fact the memory leaks are being fixed...

Mono

Posted Oct 21, 2004 17:16 UTC (Thu) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link]

Why bother making the Mono runtime stable and mature at all? Maturity isn't really needed for prototyping, and just interferes with the process of transitioning those prototypes to a real language.

Mono

Posted Oct 22, 2004 7:02 UTC (Fri) by walles (subscriber, #954) [Link]

That's a circular argument.

You're saying that since Mono isn't mature, it isn't good for anything but prototyping. And since it's only good for prototyping, why should it be made mature?

The answer is of course that *if* Mono should become stable and mature it would be good for other things than prototyping. And since it would then be good for other things than prototyping it would need to be stable and mature :-).

As is explained on "http://www.go-mono.com/languages.html", your definition of a "real" language would have to be quite uncommon to be able to find a language that couldn't potentially be run by Mono.

mono is quite mature

Posted Oct 22, 2004 12:02 UTC (Fri) by louie (subscriber, #3285) [Link]

I have my own issues with mono, but if you're criticizing the maturity or stability of mono, you obviously haven't actually used it. I have run tomboy 24x7 for a couple weeks now, and muine 24x7 for several months now, on a music box which is never rebooted and on which muine is never turned off. Neither have had memory or stability problems. There may be plenty of criticisms you can make of mono, but that's just not one of them.