Weekend

We finally released Mono 1.1.4 and Mono 1.0.6. With this release we are recommending users to switch to the 1.1.x branch, as our automated testing and regression suites are much better than they ever were on 1.0.6.

The runtime is faster, smaller, leaner and we have fixed many bugs and architectural problems that were hard to backport to 1.0.6.

Programmers that have only been using Mono, and have not tested their code on .NET should keep an eye open for a few problems that might be exposed with the stricter 1.1.4 runtime:

• C# compiler is stricter when it comes to namespace and typename resolution. Tomboy is known to not build with it.
• Marshalling: A few incorrect uses of marshalling are now reported (Pointers can not reference marshaled structures, you must use byref in your P/Invokes, this affected F-Spot, but only marginally, F-Spot fallsback into a slower operation mode).
• If you create delegates and pass those to unmanaged code as way to callback into managed land, you must keep a reference to the delegate, or the delegate will be garbage collected. This affected some old Gtk# applications. You will receive a warning message with the details to fix this problem.

The full release notes are available here

The performance difference is very visible on web-based applications. Our documentation system for example is now instantaneous.

DB4Objects

We have also started distributing DB4Objects from Mono's web site. For those of you that are missing ObjectSpaces, you might find db4o not only interesting, but faster than what ObjectSpaces could have been.

New Tool

We have included Paco's prj2make on the latest release of Mono. prj2make is a tool that produces Makefiles from Visual Studio or MonoDevelop solutions. Specially convenient if you download some random code from the network.

SHA-1 and SHA-224

This is the first release that ships with the security sandbox infrastructure, Sebastien has the full story.

Last week SHA1 was broken. Because of this Sebastien is trying to get users to vote for incorporating SHA-224 into the Framework, see the details here. Mono users can use the Mono.Security stack that ships with this and more.

Installers for Mono

Installers: The folks at RawByte.com have been kind enough to package Mono with an installer that will work on all Linux systems. Many users love this, specially those without Red Carpet or Yum, as they only have to download a single binary and they get the whole system setup: Mono, all the class libraries, Gtk# and XSP. Like our Windows installer.

There are two downsides to using the installer: for those using distributions with package management, the installer wont register Mono on the system, which means that third-party components that depend on Mono will still want RPM packages installed (or people have resorted to use the --force parameter for RPM). The second downside is that this ships a Mono configured for the smallest common denominator, so speed will suffer as Mono does not use the __thread-based local storage and has to go through a slower (but backwards compatible) system.

Hula

Hula's launch has been very successful. The Hula Channel is very active: people contributing patches, ports and various folks interested in the dynamic web interface are hanging out there. There is plenty of energy there.

We are planning on following Hula's plan to use MediaWiki as the main page for the site, because updating the Mono web site has always been a bit annoying.

Also, many people read Jamie's posting on Hula and miss-understood that Jamie was actually praising Nat's final direction on Hula, so there are plenty of comments along the lines of `Jamie slams Hula' and `They are clueless, we are not'.

Being very interested in politics, I see this phenomenon as an interesting window into the human soul: if these very smart technical people have problems understanding a post like that, what does that say for people trying to discuss and debate the finer points of public policy?

Today Novell open sourced and launched the Hula Project: an open-source groupware server.

For full details, see Nat's blog post with a rationale, screenshots and details, here: here

Beirut

Robert Fisk has two articles on Hariri's assassination yesterday: here and here.

The Phoenicia hotel seemed to be under construction: image here

I still intend to go to Beirut on vacation with Laura in three weeks.

Nat found an interview we did in 1999, when Ximian was launched. The inteview is here.

In 1999 we had to rename our company from "International Gnome Support" (IGS) to HelixCode as we feared IBM's stock would dip due to the naming conflict with their own "IBM Global Services" (IGS).

Update: It has been pointed out that our old domain for IGS is not something you want to click on if surrounded by polite company.

Interview with Edd Dumbill

There is an interesting interview with Edd Dumbill on his Mono book on a Turkish site.

iFolder has launched its new web site

Paolo has an interesting post on the memory footprint that Gnome applications incur when using Mono. The following table shows the memory usage, Virtual Memory and Resident Set Size for various runtimes running the same simple Gtk+ based application:

The important number to look at is the RSS, the VSIZE is just useful as a reference.

Paolo explores the memory consumption from Mono, as well as a few problems with small libraries.

Update: Paolo provided the numbers for Kaffe and I included his writtable mappings column.

Other observations

Paolo commented a few more things today online.

Gtk+ 2.0 has grown quite a bit (Accessibility, Pango), here is a contrast of Gtk 2.4, 1.2 and Qt. Sorted by RSS:

Ahead of Time Compilation

Note that in the numbers above, Mono was running in Just-in-Time compiler mode. One of the things that we have been working on in Mono in the 1.1.x series is improving the produced code for precompiled code. Expect the numbers for our next release to be even closer to C.

The new file format that Zoltan created is designed to maximize the pages that can be shared by using position independent code (PIC). By using PIC code various running Mono applications will share the same pages in memory and only a few pages for each library must be mapped in read-write mode and updated.

This PIC code is typically slower than code that is JIT compiled by Mono. The tradeoff that we are making is that users that run more than one Mono application will benefit by having the Mono applications share more code.

But if performance is more important than memory consumption, users can pass the -O=-aot flag to the Mono runtime. This will disable the use of the Ahead-of-Time compiled code.

The documentation for the new file format lives in mono/docs/aot-compiler.txt

Kevin and Francisco have published an article on Building Mono on Windows.

Paco said:

This article was aimed at folks that are consumers of Mono maybe even contributors of patches and documentation. My approach when collaborating with Kevin Shockey was to give departmental developers a way to build the latest and greatest. These are the folks that may have even reported a bug to the list and gotten a reply like:

"Is fixed on SVN".

The twist on this witting is that the build approach does not use MS .NET Framework, rather uses Mono to build Mono. We will later put out a set of modified instructions to uncomment a couple of lines that we suggest creating on the user's .bashrc file to enable the build using csc.exe rather than mcs.

Eugenia pointed out that "7 out of the 20 top-rated apps on gnomefiles.org are mono apps" in GnomeFiles.

Intro to Mono

There is a new article over at CodeProject on setting up Mono for .NET users on Linux and Windows.

There is a whole section covering cross-platform development with .NET over there.

Fafblog

Became addicted to Fafblog a few days ago. I started with this post.

Ciudad de México: charla sobre Mono y Gnome el dia Jueves 3 a las 4 de la tarde en el auditorio Amoxcalli de la Facultad de Ciencias en la UNAM.

Otra charla el viernes en el Instituto de Ciencias Nucleares (detalles). Este auditorio es más pequeño y creo que la entrada al público en general va a ser más difícil.

MonoDevelop

Lluis has developed an addin to develop Mono with MonoDevelop.

His blog post has more details on the work that is going into MonoDevelop.

I will be in Mexico doing a talk at my old job: Instituto de Ciencias Nucleares on Friday (Feb 4th). The program is here.

Since am going to be there since Thursday, am wondering if we people are interested in a get-together to discuss Mono and Open Source the day before?

Drop me an email, and we can set something up.

Laura is currently at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brasil:

Laura at the World Social Forum.

Youth Camping Site at the SWF.

Laura in Queretaro.

Aramis

Mono Performance Discussion

There is an interesting thread about Mono performance today. The debate centers around exception handling. For non-Monologue readers, you might want to start with the post from the Nemerle developers followed by very interesting reply from Paolo.

By the end of the day, the report from the Nemerle folks is here:

From the other news, lupus did some mambo jumbo in mono to get our testcase 4x as fast as it used to be. Impressive! If only the other implementation was as fast... I guess I can now report this as a performance issue with a nice argument in hand.

Jailed for using Lynx

Am feeling safer now: Donator to Tsunami effort jailed for using non-standard Web Brwoser.

Politics

Apparently there is another journalist paid by the administration to advance their agenda.

Darrick liked my link to the pictures of Iraq the other day pointed me to this article: What I Heard About Iraq. I liked it.

The 10 Worst Corporations of 2004. By none other than Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman.

Mokhiber runs my favorite Scottie and Me' column, previously known as `Ari and I'.