Re: Mono

["Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri" <barbieri gmail com>]

On 5/7/07, Everaldo Canuto <everaldo simios org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I am Everaldo and currently I am doing Mono packages for
> Maemo/Nokia770, I am also a maintainer of maemo-sharp (mono bindings
> for maemo libraries). I think that mono is a good solution and can be
> considered, C# syntax is really attractive.

Ok

> Here in Brazil when the only mobile device was palm, only few
> solutions appears for this devices, after WinCE some developers try
> but dont like the solutions to develop for mobile devices, now with
> .NET a lot of people buy mobile devices and develop using this
> platform, I see Mono as a open source solution for the people that
> today thinks that develop for .NET is more easy and attractive than
> use C and C++.

I think this is biased and you're comparing apples to oranges or in
more clear speaking: different epochs.

Palm development happened when development tools were all barebones,
even developing for Linux was hard, few tools other than so glorious
emacs/vi. Palm was even worse, with its narrow set of tools,
complicated support and platform was really limited: 8mb of RAM and
16Mhz were all you had.

Windows mobile development were built on top of Microsoft well known
and widespread tools, with lots of CPU and memory, like we have on
Maemo or other systems now.

So, there is no point in saying .Net helped development, because it
was just more "accessible".

Also, maemo and other embedded systems like qtopia shows that
development on well known platforms like GTK or Qt and GNU libc lowers
entry barriers, developing for Maemo is not much different than doing
GTK on desktop... actually I do write my software on regular desktop
and just when it's finished I adapt to library version found on
rootstraps (scratchbox, in my case) and then I test on device.


> In my small maemo program, C#/Mono looks works well and now i noticed
> about other people using it, some moments ago I play a memory game in
> my N770 done in C# :-)

I can't see much "wow" here, since N700 is as powerful as my PC 3-4
years ago... we can play DivX at 30fps, why not card game? If using
GTK bindings, all the work is offloaded to C-written code, so there is
no much point there.


> About NOVL/MSFT agreement,I am just a developer and as I dont know
> about agreement content I am just worry about good tools to improve my
> developments.

You should be concerned because all your code may be doomed, or
prohibited which is the same, being illegal...


> What is needed to Mono/C# be considered?

A formal letter from Microsoft saying it would never use their patents
on us. As said, so far it's a can of worms... until we don't have
enough market share to make them bother, but as soon as we do, law
suites will come.

Unfortunately, the non-technical side matters. And by the technical
side, I can't see one benefit of Mono over Java, Python or Ruby:
performance wise, Java is as fast (or faster, since some ARMs provide
special instruction set for it), Python and Ruby are as sexy or easier
than C# (ok, we have iron python...)

--
Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri
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