Re: GNOME, .Net and Mono

[Michael Rothwell <rothwell holly-springs nc us>]

On Fri, 2002-02-01 at 18:41, Havoc Pennington wrote:

> Whatever the GNOME community decides about Mono, I'm very sure we'll
> take this warning seriously:
>   http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

I suppose we could "refactor" our stuff into the ".Mono" framework. :P

It's a matter of how the whole thing gets carried off. If Mono spends
its life playing catch-up-to-Microsoft, then we are screwed, I think. If
it focuses on using the good ideas in .Net (safety, reuse, portability)
to make a better applications platform, regardless of bug and feature
compatibility with Microsoft's .Net, then it will probably work out
better. I don't know enough about .Net to say that it will "work out
pretty well." I keep thinking of that other effort to port Windows APIs
to Unix, and the problems it has had keeping up and making all the bugs
work. But it runs Minesweeper!

And Microsoft will have a natural advantage in the .Net world. Miguel
already said that some Win32 stuff was being emulated for Mono. On top
of that, .Net does not have to be as portable as Mono. It can assume
things about its underlying OS, which will be some type of Windows,
probably based on NT. Mono isn't a Linux-only thing. It has to cope with
different display systems, system libraries, kernels, processors...

How crucial is C#? Can C, C++ and Python be used without ever writing a
stitch of C#? On a more strategic level, what will Sun think of using a
clone of a Microsoft product as one of its core technologies? Maybe
Gnome 2 will be standard on Solaris. But will Gnome 4?

I imagine a lot of questions will be answered by a proof of concept
gnome-on-Mono.

Geez, how much of Nautilus will have to be changed or rewritten? How
will Bonobo be used with Mono? What kind of interactions will there be
between Mono and GTK?

In short, color me skeptical.