Re: Codegear in the news

Lars Fosdal wrote:
"Nathaniel L. Walker" <NatLWalker@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

As I said above, I don't think the market is exceedingly more lenient to Mono as opposed to BDS2006. Like BDS2006, once you go past the rudimentary support Mono offers for .NET, it becomes near useless as a programming tool/platform.

With Paint.NET running under Mono on Linux, I'd say that the support
is slightly better than rudimentary.

Yes, and Novell uses Mono for its update client software, and users are damning it for it's sluggishness and its ability to make their machine run like it was brought 8 years ago.

Mono also lags behind Microsoft's Framework in the same (and in many cases more extensive) ways as Borland Developer Studio 2006 IRT Visual Studio 2005. Yes, I think it is rudimentary. About as Rudimentary as Lazarus' support for Win32 VCL development (and people are producing commercial applications with Lazarus, right? Right).

I'm not trying to damn Mono or say it "sucks". It's a great effort, but the fact and the matter is that if Mono was up to par, people would be happily dumping Windows Server for Linux to host their ASP.NET web applications, and there would be much more .NET applications worth mentioning than Paint.NET and Novell's update client software.

And, of course, Mono is harder to deploy on Linux than the .NET Framework on Windows, due to dependencies. It's not even guaranteed to run on every distro. No one wants another Linux dev tool limited to a few "commercial" distros. They want something on a platform that is at least upward compatible, without hellish install/deployment problems.

Take a Windows 2000 desktop (with SP4), slap on .NET 2.0
Take a Windows XP desktop, slap on .NET 2.0
Windows will include 2.0

Linux, enjoy downloading many packages and hope you distro have the correct dependencies (true, some distros include it).

Also, with even free distros having the ability to automatically update their software, you never know when you will roll in a Mono update that will break compatibility.

The same fears that everyone has IRT Microsoft are real [even more so] on Linux, a platform known for its ability to break existing applications on upgrade, and known for the plethora of patches that can come through via automatic updates. My SLED 10 trial that I'm running in VMWare has had major updates to many packages in the past 30 days. In all, 135 patches have come through auto update (many a day).

There are better *NIX platforms to target (from a developer perspective) like Solaris (which is upward compatible) but they are less widespread (mostly because they were commercial and VERY expensive until recently, but my Sun Workstation is OTW from eBay :p ). Many can expect it to gain more adoption in coming time, it's actually picking up nicely and setting itself up as a very nice platform (1 desktop environment [based on gnome] binary compatibility [upward], etc.) There is also Mac OSX. Linux is a moving target (that moves incredibly fast), producing developer tools for it (not IDEs, but compilers etc.) is a monumental effort.

For what it's worth, Sun has ported it's compilers to Linux, and they are comparable to the toolchains from Intel (full support for C99 and the C++ standard, and Fortran 95 standards; and awesome performance/code generation - they've set some records). The new Sun Studio Express is equally good (based on NetBeans), IMO. There won't be room on Linux for a C++ compiler, and with what FPC has been doing lately (and the amount of support it's gained in the community), I don't know what they can do in the Pascal scene. Maybe they can approach Linux by supporting a compiler like Free Pascal via [truly] cross-platform libraries/components?

Unless they are offering a RAD solution for Linux (RAD in the true sense, not just GUI RAD), there is absolutely no room for them on Linux and it would not be worth their time to even attempt to try to cross that boundary again.

P.S. Java-based IDEs (like Sun Studio) run quite snappily with Java SE 6 - and Java SE 6 can give you some pretty good results IRT GUI development (NetBeans has an environment that's as intuitive as Delphi for that). They have really made improvements regarding Look-and-Feel. I think this is perhaps the most important release ever for that platform.

--
Nathaniel L. Walker

"The compiler should be your servant, not your
master."

Richard Stallman,
"GNU Coding Standards"
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: A cross-platform vision for Delphi
    ... "No, Microsoft does not support the Mono product, nor has it licensed ... a hedge/plan B in case Windows starts to lose marketshare. ... MONO apps written on Linux work on both. ...
    (borland.public.delphi.non-technical)
  • Re: Creating CGFramework
    ... most people in Delphi community don't really want to accept it... ... people as the best solution to Linux problem. ... would have to step in and finish Mono in a few months. ... I don't think anyone things Linux to be an important *desktop* platform. ...
    (borland.public.delphi.non-technical)
  • Re: What Linux distribution to choose for learning Ruby and Ruby on Rails
    ... The Mono Project is an open development initiative sponsored by Novell to develop an open source, UNIX version of the Microsoft .NET development platform. ... I've minimal experience with mono (the resultant app is executable on both linux and windows). ...
    (comp.lang.ruby)
  • Re: Languages, .NET, and shareware
    ... Mono emulates nothing. ... there is no such thing as a C# standard. ... http://www.kaffe.org/ appears to be an implementation of the Java virtual ... But if the market shifts somewhat in the direction of Linux, ...
    (comp.software.shareware.authors)
  • Re: A cross-platform vision for Delphi
    ... Targeting Mono for both Winforms and server apps instead of native Linux ... support for almost no additional effort. ...
    (borland.public.delphi.non-technical)