Mono

Mono is a project led by Novell (formerly by Ximian) to create an ECMA standard compliant .NET compatible set of tools, including among others a C# compiler and a Common Language Runtime. Mono can be run on Linux, FreeBSD, UNIX, Mac OS X, Solaris and Windows operating systems. more...

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Mono is dual licensed by Novell, similar to other products such as Qt and the Mozilla Application Suite. Mono's C# compiler and tools are released under the GNU General Public License (GPL), the runtime libraries under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) and the class libraries under the MIT License. These are all free software and open-source licenses and hence Mono is free and open-source software. Developers contributing source code to Mono must sign a copyright assignment allowing Novell to relicense the code under other licensing terms. This preserves Novell's ability under the dual license to commercially license Mono.

Microsoft has a version of .NET available for FreeBSD, Windows and Mac OS X called the Shared Source CLI (Rotor). Microsoft's shared source license may be insufficient for the needs of the community (it explicitly forbids commercial use). The Mono project has many of the same goals as the Portable.NET project.

The Mono runtime contains a just-in-time compilation (JIT) engine for a number of processors: x86, SPARC, PowerPC, ARM, S390 (in 32-bit and 64-bit mode), and x86-64, IA64 and SPARC for 64-bit modes. The runtime will perform a just-in-time compilation to the machine's native code which is cached as the application runs. It is also possible to precache the native image before execution. For other supported systems not listed, an interpreter performs each byte code one by one without compiling the image to native code. In almost every condition the JIT method will outperform the interpreted method.

History

Miguel de Icaza became interested in .NET technology as soon as the .NET documents came out in December 2000. After looking at the byte code interpreter, he realized that there were no specifications for the metadata. In February 2001 de Icaza asked for the missing information on the metadata file format in the .NET mailing lists and at the same time started to work on a C# compiler written in C#, as an exercise in C#. In April 2001 ECMA published the missing file format, and at GUADEC (April 6 – April 8, 2001) de Icaza demonstrated the features of his compiler (which by then was able to parse itself).

Internally at Ximian there was much discussion about building tools to increase productivity: making it possible to create more applications in less time and therefore reduce time and cost of development. After a feasibility study, which clearly stated that it was possible to build the technology, Ximian reassigned staff from other projects and created the Mono team. Lacking the manpower to build a full .NET replacement on their own, they formed the Mono open source project, which was announced on July 19, 2001 at the O'Reilly conference.

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