Help us test Mono 2.10

Andrew has just released the packages for our first preview of Mono 2.10, we published sources and packages for SLES, OpenSUSE, RHEL, Windows and MacOS X here:

http://mono.ximian.com/monobuild/preview/download-preview

From our draft release notes, here are some of the highlights in this release:

• SGen Precise Stack Scanning and many performance improvements.
• New Profiler engine
• Google Native Client Support
• Faster socket stack
• Improved Parallel Framework
• Cecil/Light
• New C# Compiler backend (can now use any custom mscorlib)
• VB Compiler can now compile to both 2.0 and 4.0 profiles.

As well as containing a pile of bug fixes.

As I mentioned last year, we are moving to a faster release schedule to get important features out for our users faster. For instance, our SGen garbage collector has been vastly improved and should perform better under load, and our ParallelFX got some real-life testing which helped us improve it significantly.

SGen Technical Discussion

Mark has been blogging the technical details about the architecture of the SGen garbage collector, you can read the documents here:

• Introduction to SGen
• SGen's Nursery
• SGen's Major Collectors