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Comment by LukeShu | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, Mono exists, and contains a free implementation of C#.

I have done less than 10 hours of .NET programming in my life so I have no idea here... but my impression is that MONO substantially less accepted than a standard Java port... not trying to bash, just explaining my view. I'm moving a significant production Java app from a Linux box to Windows in the next 3 months. My expected work is about 2-days, and frankly my management wouldn't expect more, and I'd have a hard time justifying more (it's probably padded already... don't tell). The portability of Java apps is wonderful. I'd guess MONO could do the same thing, Windows to Linux, but just explaining the run-time to my management or Change Management would require testing, which is cost, which is probably waste, but is also necessary... a Oracle JVM on Linux or Windows, doesn't require the same due diligence.

Unity is probably the biggest commercial use of Mono: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unity_(game_engine)

Xamarin is more likely.

I have done less than 10 hours of .NET programming in my life so I have no idea here... but

Then don't comment. Your comment is comparing something you know to something you have no idea about. How can anyone legitimately make such a comparison?

I can tell you I've done 10 minutes of C# programming in my life, while addressing a StackOverflow comment, and in that 10 minutes I found something that worked on Microsoft's .NET runtime but not on Mono. You don't need experience to find evidence.

True, but you can't spruik that and then tell us in the next breath about the wonderful developer tools and Intellisense, etc., because most of that doesn't exist outside Windows. With Java it's not just the JVM that is cross platform - the whole developer ecosystem and culture is from the ground up. Every IDE, every compiler, every tool, all runs on every platform. It has it's holes, but largely Java actually achieves this, which when you need it, is a huge win.

OT:, pardon this non-native, what does "spruik" mean? I can only find this[0] but it seems an intransitive verb compared to what you used

[0] http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/spruik

Heh, I didn't even realise it was Australian slang. The meaning from your link is correct - to sell, extoll the virtues of or try to convince other people to buy something.

English. spruikers are the guys at open air markets screaming out the virtues of their wares.

MonoDevelop is far from bad, actually. And cross-platform.

Xamarin is wonderful. There's a huge .NET OSS ecosystem out there. You might be surprised with what can be done with it.

http://xamarin.com

Unfortunately it looks like xamarin has completely abandoned linux as a platform.

Citation please?

Of the language, not the libraries or tooling.

A language is much more than just syntax.

With mono, one ends up writing C# code similar to C and C++, with #ifdefs, or having to search for .NET libraries that are cross platform.

Those cases are inherently platform specific and are impossible to abstract completely.

UI for example. Pure Java UIs plain suck; you can use Gtk# in C# for the same thing, but none will be up to the platform's UI standards.

Besides, the JVM isn't available on iOS and Android, so it isn't universally available either.

Java is actually used heavily on Android.

On Dalvik not JVM.

Infrastructure of Mono is not in any way comparable to proper c#. Also how come MonoDevelop's latest version doesn't work on Linux? On Windows it became Xamarian and it is ok ish, but I would not use it for a major project, refactoring tools are more or less non existant. On Linux they are stuck with the old version of MonoDevelop

What do you mean it doesn't work on linux? It works fine. It helps to use the distro (opensuse) the mono developers use.

MSFT could shut down Mono anytime it wants.How many business use mono (to build web apps) in production?

Scala,Groovy,Xtend,etc... there is enough languages on the jvm one doesnt have to use any MS related tech.