6 April 2005
Mono and .net
Posted by Mikhail Esteves under: General .
Miguel de Icaza explains what Mono, a development platform, is all about:
.NET was a company-wide branding effort at Microsoft that spanned multiple projects. Mono is most similar to one component of it: the .NET framework. We are an open source implementation of the virtual machine, the C# language, the base class libraries, and we have a compatibility stack (ASP.NET, ADO.NET, and Windows.Forms). In addition to that, Mono has produced a very large set of extra libraries.
[…]
A few of the attributes that Mono [has] over traditional environments are:
- Easy to integrate with native libraries: The Platform/Invoke feature allows developers to call into native operating system libraries without having to write glue code.
- Automatic memory management: Using a language with a garbage collector is a great productivity gain, as developers can focus on real problems instead of fighting with the circuitry every time.
- A feature-full runtime: The runtime provides many features to applications running on it, from a thread-aware and thread-safe set of libraries to built-in garbage collection.
- Modern APIs: The industry has learned a lot about OO API design in the last few years; this are now available for developers to use in a nice package.