
Mono 2.8 has been released - icey
http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2010/Oct-06.html
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mahmud
Any mono users here also familiar with .net? how compatible are they? What
works and what doesn't? What sort of applications is mono best suited for
(server backend? desktop? mobile? web front end? systems programming?)

Would be nice to dish and get real insider info.

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mcculley
We are a predominantly Unix/Linux shop that has taken over a .NET project. We
are doing builds with Hudson and Mono for a web application that gets deployed
to IIS. Overall, everything works but there have been a few surprises.

One surprise was that debugging is hard because Mono uses a different format
for debugging symbols. This means we get tracebacks with no line numbers.

The second surprise is that we have to munge resulting executables with
corflags.exe to force them to run in 32-bit mode on 64-bit boxes where there
are library dependencies that keep them from being 64-bit clean.

We are trying to develop using MonoDevelop but there are some weird
incompatibilities with the SQL Server client library. These are not
insurmountable, but it has been a hassle.

The other hassle is that MonoDevelop is terribly slow. It does not appear to
be able to do incremental compiles so any change to the project results in a
recompile of the entire project.

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sandGorgon
how is the performance of Mono/ASP.net vs stacks like RoR, PHP, etc. on Linux
?

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migueldeicaza
Mono's ASP.NET or MVC or Manos are all running natively compiled code, so for
equivalent tasks they should all be faster than interpreted languages.

Whether this matters or not will depend on the what your application is doing
and how many users you have. For example, if your application is database
bound or file system bound you wont likely notice much of a difference as the
time you spend running CIL code or interpreted code is a small portion of your
overall CPU consumption.

With Mono 2.8 we significantly improved Mono's web server scalability, but
this will not matter if your application does not use or require more than a
handful of CPUs. But is incredibly useful for people that are scaling servers
under load.

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runjake
Miguel,

How is your team keeping such a fast pace? Do you get a lot of assistance or
documentation for Microsoft. Your rate of feature parity with the MS releases
is impressive.

~~~
migueldeicaza
Well, we prioritize what developers need using our Moma tool (this tool does a
static analysis of your executables and libraries and informs us what APIs are
the most important to get).

In addition, a big help was the fact that Microsoft open sourced large swats
of code in this release (DLR, MWF, OData, LINQ, and a bunch more).

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arst
Funny coincidence that Mono and LLVM both had 2.8 releases on the same day,
and one of Mono 2.8's new features is a stable LLVM backend.

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j_baker
I'm glad to finally be able to use C# 4.0 and dynamic types in Mono. That's a
huge improvement!

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sshconnection
Is there a packaged build of MoMa for 2.8 available? I couldn't get our code
base working in 2.6 due to a few compatibility issues, but a quick once over
the compatibility page looks like those issues may be resolved. Here's looking
forward to testing a lot of cross platform code!

