Horst Herb wrote: > On Monday 15 May 2006 11:27, Andre Duszynski wrote: >> Isn't Mono just another variant of .Net ?? > > Minus the patented and mostly undisclosed / undocumented core features, e.g. > the authentication bits / cryptography etc. > .Net is a poorly implemented good idea
The opinion of those who have really used .NET and delved into its internals seems to be is that it is actually rather well designed and rather well implemented. Witness the fact that IronPython, which is Python implemented on top of the .NET CLR, runs as fast as and in many cases a lot faster than CPython (Python implemented in C). And I am told by people whose opinions I trust that C# is a vastly better designed and nicer-to-use language than Java. However, all that counts for absolutely nothing because .NET and C# and everything related to it has one huge flaw, and that is that it is completely proprietary, owned and patented lock, stock and barrel by Microsoft. <fud>Thus, if you are prepared to hitch yourself completely to the Microsoft star, then .NET is a reasonable bet. But 5 years from now, with a plummeting share price and Gates and Ballmer leading the company in all sorts of strange, mercurial directions (eg tilting at the Linux windmill), then that bet may not seem so safe. Who really knows? Dice anyone? </fud> > Mono is a well implemented bad idea I'm told (by acquaintances who teach post-grad programming nd compiler design) that the initial implementations of Mono were not very good, lagging far behind the quality of the official Microsoft .NET implementation (not surprisingly, given the resources available to the Mono developers), but recently it has become rather usable. However, Microsoft holds key US, Australian, Canadian, Japanese and Indian patents on .NET and C# "technology" on which Mono depends, and so can pull the rug out from under it at any stage. That's a pretty big risk. Of course, if they did that, then there is always the possibility of porting your application to Windows and genuine .NET - a process which should not be too expensive (but not completely trivial either). Personally, as I become older and wiser, I am increasingly suspicious of any technology owned and monopolised by a single entity, especially a corporate entity known to play hard-ball in the game of international capitalism. Tim C _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [email protected] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk
