Lars Fosdal writes:
Quote
"Nathaniel L. Walker" <XXXX@XXXXX.COM>writes:
>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 would 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 is 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 is 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 is 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 am 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 is 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 is worth, Sun has ported it is 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 is 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 is 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"