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Comment by bsharper | Hacker News Reader

Miguel de Icaza is kind of a legend, I know him most from his work on Mono and Gnome. Whatever he works on today will likely be part of a stack you work on in a few years (at least that's my experience).

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Also, let's not forget he's the one who brought Swift to the Godot engine https://github.com/migueldeicaza/SwiftGodot

Related, for everyone interested into Godot + Swift, check out https://github.com/johnsusek/SwiftGodotBuilder I think Swift might soon be a crazy ergonomic language to make Godot games.

respect to icaza for his contributions (tho I was on the KDE side of the gnome/kde desktop "wars"), but has the "Whatever he works on today will likely be part of a stack you work on in a few years" been true for a long time?

i'm rather unfamiliar with his work post-mono.

After successfully getting Xamarin acquired by Microsoft, apparently he got disappointed how everything turned out, especially the decisions that lead to the Xamarin.Forms to MAUI rewrite, MonoDevelop being killed, or what is left of Mono/Xamarin.

Nowadays he is full into Apple and Swift ecosystem, doing apps, and contributing to Godot on Apple, making it Swift first with goodies for doing iPadOS based game development.

Development focused on iPadOS as an export platform, or using an iPad as the actual dev environment?

Actual dev environment, they've ported the Godot editor to SwiftUI and touch controls.

https://xogot.com/

Oh, very cool. Just watched the YouTube on some of the porting challenges. Love the idea of a full fledged game dev environment the kids can graduate to from scratch Jr. and the like.

Combine this with an Apple Pencil, Pixelmator pro and Blender and you’ve got yourself a great little hyper portable game kit. Don’t think I’d do too much hardcore coding in this form factor, but if I had an existing prototype that I just wanted to tweak a bit and play around with, it seems legit.

Everybody could see how the whole Microsoft thing was going to go except Miguel, apparently. Worse he was very smug and self-righteous about selling out.

He also wrote (or at least started) midnight commander!

Thank you. I've used mc since my slackware days and still use it. I never new Miguel wrote it

He was also a shill for Microsoft back when they were trying to destroy Linux.

The way he was handled was another loss for the Year of Desktop Linux, but who cares, lets use Proton and call it "Linux" gaming.

"What Killed the Linux Desktop"

https://tirania.org/blog/archive/2012/Aug-29.html

"How I ended up with Mac"

https://tirania.org/blog/archive/2013/Mar-05.html

If I don’t use Mono or Gnome, what else from him is part of my stack today?

Unity engine , the most popular game engine based on mono. Also gnome software like glib , cairo , harfbuzz prolly used as foundation by all OSes, gui toolkit, programming language or browser on the market.

It's likely you do use Mono or a successor. The modern dotnet framework is a descendent of Mono and is used in a variety of websites, games, and other applications.

Thankfully I don't use Mono or anything related to dotnet framework.

Only in spirit, other than trimming, Mono AOT for Xamarin and Blazor, there is hardly much left, and very few use Xamarin.Android/iOS.

IIRC, Mono's base class library was also used to fill the cross-platform gaps in .NET Core 2-3 back when they ported the Framework APIs they had removed for Core 1. I don't know how much of that remains though.

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