Novell Mono project and .NET portability

[devMachine]

http://www.mono-project.com/Main_Page


For those of you who haven't heard of it yet, mono is supposed to make .net code portable to linux systems, sun solaris systems, MAC OSX, etc. From what I understand right now only .net 1.1 is supported, and a vb.net compiler is still in the works.


I just wanted to hear what people who knew more about this that I do thought. From what I understand this could potentially mean .NET programming job pool explosion. .NET will be the new and imporved JAVA.


Opinions/insights?

 

[cjard]

.NET always was the new Java.. Think about it:

Microsoft do a huge amount of work providing Java, then J#. Thing was, they overstepped the mark and tried to customise java to be MS-only. Sun sued them and won. Microsoft packed up their ball and went home.

Millions of dollars invested in java need salvaging - how to do such a thing? Hmm.. Take the java concept (appeal to a wide developer audience because it is multi platform) and tweak it a bit (appeal to a wide developer audience because it is multi-syntax), make it target Windows only (good commercial sense) and you have .NET

.NET compiles to IL, like java bytecode, and runs in a virtual machine (the framework, effectively) like java vm..

Now here's the masterstroke, the pure commercial marketing genius: Fans of syntaxes MS cant be bothered with (Ruby, COBOL) are free to create it, and so long as it compiles to IL, it will work. COBOL.NET exists, so does ruby.. I'm sure ther are others. Developer appeal widens. Cool. But it doesnt end there - some nut cases decide to ape java's multi platform by writing a VM for non-windows. Even cooler; eventually Microsoft apps can run on systems all across the world, not necessarily even Windows based, or written in a syntax that Microsoft created.. MS input $0 and have a HUGE market share. Unbelievable genius! MS arent even likely to be bothered that someone can write a COBOL.NET program and run it in Mono, never having paid any licence fees to MS, because the other syntaxes will always be playing catchup; MS dont lose on this one, becuase the fans just cant run as fast as MS; Mono 1.1 is getting there as MS are starting to gear up for 3.0, so we dont really care that these guys never paid a licence fee because a) they didnt cost anything and b) at least the competition dont have them

Brilliance.