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Comment by TylerE | Hacker News Reader

If this results in a useable, performant (e.g. NOT mono) C#/CLR implementation on *nix, that makes a lot of things very interesting.

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> If this results in a useable, performant (e.g. NOT mono) C#/CLR implementation on *nix, that makes a lot of things very interesting.

I'm not sure what yiou mean by this.

Do you mean you want a new implementation that inst' mono? or that you don't believe that mono is fast?

if its the later then I'd have to disagree with you. We use mono for a real time trading system and find it to be more than capable of handling our needs.

This is a nit-pick of mine, but Mono seems to be always at the bottom of this benchmark: http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/

If you could share details on Mono tuning for server workloads, It'd be very interested.

Looking at the error count column suggests that the benchmark setup is just plain broken. I can't imagine the times are accurate.

After many of its iterations have been posted to HN with little improvement in quality, it's clear that the point of the benchmark is to tout certain languages like Java, so this is not surprising

I don't think this is fair. Is there a better alternative available?

There's the old favorite http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/which-programming-lang...

But it's down at the moment http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/shootout.alioth.debian.or...

My 2 cents: I recently needed to run some .NET code which (1) relies heavily on floating point math and (2) constantly creates and destroys lots of objects in the course of said number crunching. A typical run would take from several hours to more than a day.

Doing this on Linux with the latest Mono proved painful: it kept crashing at random points, with native errors suggesting the problem was in Mono's memory management. The same code never crashes on Windows/.NET, and it runs 3-4 times faster (same hardware booting off a Windows partition instead of Linux).

This is not what I would like to report, because I really like both Linux and .NET, and I would love for Mono to be competitive. Maybe today's news will contribute to that happening.

You should have brought that up to Xamarin. I am sure they would have liked to see what was going on to make mono better.

Exactly, one reports bugs in the bug tracker (with code that demonstrates the issue), not in HN.

By the way, did you test with the new garbage collector? (Enabled by default in Mono 3.2.x)

Nothing in this press release points towards such an implementation. Mono and Linux aren't even mentioned in the entire article. This is all about C# -> Android/iOS. In fact, it weakens the future of Mono by making Xamarin stronger in MS's ecosystem with the whole VS 2013 integration and MSDN subscriptions.

This.

It's hard to see this as anything except Microsoft playing 'me too' with app developers as people flock away from their CLR for mono.

It's good for c# developers, there's no doubt, but I'm suddenly wary now; I can well imagine a future where Xamarin is bought by Microsoft and their tools become Microsoft lock in. That's not a future I'm enthusiastic about.

Android is built on top of Linux, though.

The kernel, not the userland. Writing for Dalvik is very different to writing for GNU/Linux.

Xamarin on Android runs on Mono directly on the kernel. It skips Dalvik

I knew it could (with Xamarin's thing they did rewriting Android in C# to test performance) but I didn't know that's how it worked for the stuff you build with their tools. That's awesome.

What's wrong with Mono? My software (c# app) is used by thousands of users on Mac and Ubuntu without any issues. I'm very happy with Mono.

I want Mono and all the Java ecosystem(ported to Mono of course). That is a winning combo.

IKVM is not enough?

Nope.

Mono's performance has improved quite a bit in 3.x with the introduction of SGEN and the LLVM backend.

People say Mono is slow as if it wasn't evolving all the time.

People do the same for Java, though, which probably contains one of the best JIT compilers out there currently.

It still takes seconds to start up though.

I can only offer anecdotal evidence, but mono runs quite well on FreeBSD; it may not be 100% as fast as the CLR on Windows, but it's still plenty quick.

In fact, it ran so well, I later wrote up an installation guide on the F# Foundation website (http://fsharp.org/use/freebsd/) and I've heard other users have had similarly good experiences with this combination.

Xamarin relies heavily on mono, I don't see them rebuilding it just for Linux when they're so heavily invested in the MS platform.

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