Hi, >> I figured Mono was way too big for my phone and Symbian OS only >> includes a POSIX compatibility library and otherwise uses C++ >> libraries along with its own conventions, so porting Mono directly >> seemed problematic at least. > > Mono does require very little from the underlying OS other than Posix. > It might be interesting to get it working on that platform as well.
I defintely agree that this would have been the easiest, yes. Mono does use TLS so would be okay, however I am not aware of any of its dependencies (glib, etc.) being available, also Symbian uses its own (ugly) Perl-based make system on Windows. > Writing a fully compliant CLI is going to take a lot longer than > carefully turning features off I'd guess that! > (we already support turning a few > features off, see: > > http://www.mono-project.com/Small_footprint > > For more details. Last time I checked I believe Mono was about 8 MB in whole. By comparison my phone has 4 MB in whole minus RAM and data (with no memory expansion possibilities) so a CLI should be no larger than maybe 500 KB - I doubt a compiler optimization, stripped debug symbols and locales would make such a big difference, and regarding the required autoconf etc. changes getting Mono to compile on Intel OS X was already a hard thing for me! I can understand that Symbian OS (just like Solaris) is not Novell's top priority, but there was virtually no response from other potential contributors - the posts were originally about porting Mono after all - and alone I am at a loss there. Symbian OS rarely uses exes but mostly dlls even for applications up to Symbian OS 8.x, so memory cleanup is key which it does using strict two-phase object construction, a cleanup stack and its own exception handling mechanism (C++ exceptions only on Symbian OS 9.x); to support this infrastructure there are so-called descriptors that wrap access to arrays or memory areas. Supporting all this would make the Mono codebase pretty ugly with lots of #ifdefs. Andreas _______________________________________________ Mono-list maillist - [email protected] http://lists.ximian.com/mailman/listinfo/mono-list
