Mono-less Moonlight

by Miguel de Icaza

For the sake of minimizing our valgrind time, dividing and conquering the task of spotting leaks, and to reduce the surface that must be audited for security for Silverlight, Rolf has commited support that removes the Mono dependency from Moonlight.

Moonlight 1.0 will not require Mono anymore (Moonlight 1.1, that tracks Silverlight 1.1 will).

In the meantime the team has been busy performance tuning video playback for Moonlight. As it turns out there is no one-size-fits all optimization for video on Linux as different video cards are accelerated differently.

When we were describing one of our hacks to improve performance to Kevin Gallo he quoted a friend of his on graphics performance, and it went more or less like this "Graphics performance work is basically a collection of hacks".

It inspired confidence in some of the tricks that we have been doing to reduce the work that Moonlight does.

My friend Chris Toshok is looking for a college to attend to learn a few new tricks. He has a few constraints, but if you can help him find a place in Boston, we might be able to bring him back to the Norteast.

Posted on 24 Sep 2007