Writer Strike: Daily Show and the Colbert Report

by Miguel de Icaza

Despite the writer's strike, both the Daily Show and the Colbert Report have been fantastic these last two weeks.

The first couple of days, Stephen seemed to have fall out of shape after this long break, but by the end of last week he was in full Colbert swing.

They have both been fantastic, and am even more impressed now with John and Stephen. They truly are masters of their domain.

Still, a few things are missing here and there. I miss "The Word" segment very much.

Posted on 17 Jan 2008


Good News on File Formats

by Miguel de Icaza

Brian Jones posted two great news today on his blog.

Microsoft has agreed to:

  • Publish their file format specification for the .doc, .xls and .ppt and do this under their Open Specification Promise.
  • To simplify the understanding of the mapping between the old binary formats and the new ones, they will start an open source project to generate OOXML files from the old binary file formats.

These specs and projects are scheduled for February 15th.

The full details are on Brian's Blog. These are great news for all third party implementations that need to interop with those documents.

Some cheering is in order.

Posted on 17 Jan 2008


Joseph Hill Joins Novell

by Miguel de Icaza

Long time Mono contributor Joseph Hill (also an early advocate of Boo, and its integration and use in MonoDevelop) joined Novell today as Mono's Product Manager.

Joseph will be my peer in the PM organization at Novell.

Joseph blogs at Beyond Focus and is currently based in Dallas, but will soon be moving to Boston.

Posted on 08 Jan 2008


GNOME Do Gets Home Page

by Miguel de Icaza

David has setup a web site for Gnome DO, my new favorite app. The one that is helping me move away from the shell.

See some screenshots or his latest screencast.

For Banshee and Evolution integration, you need to download the extra plugins from here.

Posted on 06 Jan 2008


Mono goes Accessible!

by Miguel de Icaza

Brad Taylor has announced the first release of the Mono Accessibility stack:

UI Automation provides programmatic access to most user interface (UI) elements on the desktop, enabling assistive technology products such as screen readers to provide information about the UI to end users and to manipulate the UI by means other than standard input. UI Automation also allows automated test scripts to interact with the UI.

Mono's Accessibility Framework is an implementation of UI Automation. The same API that is available for WPF and the framework is used by Silverlight and Windows.Forms.

Client Code: The initial launch of Mono Accessibility adds accessibility support to applications built with Windows.Forms to be accessible.

Backend Code: The code has a bridge that talks to the existing ATK framework on Linux.

In the future the Mono Accessibility framework will be used in our own Moonlight 2.0.

Check the release notes, install from source or use OpenSUSE's 1-click install.

Posted on 05 Jan 2008


Moonlight

by Miguel de Icaza

My good friend Robert O'Callahan discusses Silverlight on his latest blog entry, in particular, he asks the question:

No matter how good Silvelright is or how bad the alternatives are, Silverlight domination will be a really bad thing for free software so I question why Miguel wants to push in that direction.

Robert, it is very easy.

I have been using Linux as my main desktop operating system since 1992 and endured every missing feature, every broken driver, every broken X setup and every missing application since I started.

I did so because it was free software, and I had decided that I wanted to run my entire system with free software. I felt that dogfooding Linux and improving Linux on a day-to-day basis would help improve this OS as opposed to improving a proprietary OS.

Sure, using a proprietary OS had its benefits: more consistency, more QA, more applications, lots of support, latest video drivers, but they were not free. So I stuck with free software. Today the only proprietary software that I use on my desktop is Flash (I have acrobat installed, but I use Evince instead, keep it for those cases where Evince has a bug).

From my perspective, it is crucial for Linux to have good support for Silverlight because I do not want Linux on the desktop to become a second class citizen ever again.

Robert, you are asking those of us that use FOSS operating systems to "take one for the team" by not endorsing Silverlight, but yet, you are not willing to live among us. If you are going to preach, preach by example.

The core of the debate is whether Microsoft will succeed in establishing Silverlight as a RIA platform or not. You believe that without Moonlight they would not have a chance of success, and I believe that they would have regardless of us.

In fact, I believe strongly that it is part of Microsoft becoming more open and adapting itself to the multitude of shifts in this industry (open sourcing IronPython, IronRuby, the DLR, the JS library for ASP.NET, the MS-PL, the MS-RL, opening up their code, and so on).

Ever since I met Benjamin Zander am a hopeless romantic, and believe in a world of possibility. I find myself to be happier this way than joining these ranks. And what better way of bringing Silverlight to Linux than to work together with Microsoft: they are giving us specs, they are giving us their test suites, and they are providing technical assistance. Its been a pleasure to work with them, and everything we write is open source software, I for one, could not ask for more.

Now, regardless of the strategic discussion about endorsing Silverlight, there are technicalities about Silverlight that make it a fascinating platform. I personally want to write cross platform web applications using C#, Boo, Python and Ruby. And that matters to me, and matters to others.

And I have loved Silverlight since it embedded the CLR runtime. Nothing new there, you can read the gory details of my fascination from back then.

You advocate using standards that are implemented by multiple vendors. But what if none of those vendors is providing what I want? What if the vendors do not care about my opinion?

What we got here is a case of an underserved market.

This is why competition is good. Now Microsoft is providing something that none of the existing web vendors had provided and some of us want. I liked it so much, that I did not hesitate for a second when a journalist asked me whether we would do an OSS implementation of it. "Can I quote you on that?" he said during the coffee break at Mix "Yes, you can".

You talk about Microsoft's control over Silverlight.

What prevents anyone from taking the Moonlight source code, embracing it, extending it, innovate with it, prototype with it, and enter the same cycle that Linux, or web browsers have entered? Or someone turning it into a standard?

Nothing.

The only thing preventing it is lack of imagination.

Posted on 04 Jan 2008


Obama Wins Iowa

by Miguel de Icaza

Wow.

Barack Obama just won in Iowa.

It was nice to see that Dennis Kucinich endorsed Obama on the second Iowa ballot.

I love it! Go Obama!

Obama speech at Youtube.

Posted on 04 Jan 2008


Plastic 2.0 Preview

by Miguel de Icaza

The guys at Codice Software have just announced the release of their Plastic 2.0 Preview.

Plastic is a cross-platform, distributed source code control management system that has a few interesting features like visualization and it integrates into a number of IDEs.

This is a Windows.Forms application that was originally built for Windows and they have created their own look and feel across multiple platforms. Here is Plastic running on a Mac with our new native drivers for OSX:

And this one is showing their diff tool on Linux:

We are very excited to see a happy Mono user making their software available on new platforms.

For a full tour of the new features see their blog entry.

You can test drive Plastic with their VMware image.

The Plastic guys are great in that they provide great bug reports and are working with our Windows.Forms team to iron out some of the wrinkles in our Windows.Forms implementation.

Posted on 03 Jan 2008


Mono on the OLPC

by Miguel de Icaza

My good friend Torello Quercy has been working on creating OLPC activities using Mono.

He wrote a tutorial on creating Mono-based activities for the OLPC.

See his blog for screenshots of his own game and a port of Jordi Mas' GBrainy and how he Sugar-ified the apps:

GBrainy Sugarified on the OLPC.

You can get the activity bundles from here and here.

Posted on 03 Jan 2008


Language Shootout

by Miguel de Icaza

Alvaro points out that in the Language Shootout Benchmark Mono comes in 18th place compared to Java's 10th place.

We know that Sun's proprietary Java edition (not the open source one, as that one is nowhere to be found yet) is faster than Mono, but I was surprised that we were so far behind. So I looked at the comparison between Java6 and Mono.

Memory usage wise, we mostly come ahead, but in performance, there were two places where Sun's server VM beat Mono seriously in performance (5x or more), one is the regex-dna test and the other one is pidigits test.

The regex test is a test of the regular expression matching engine in the class libraries, not really a test of the language or VM performance, but library implementation. Clearly, our Regex implementation could use some work.

The pidigits test was showing up as 6x better with Java than with Mono. But the test is basically comparing C# vs assembly language. In Mono's case it is using a full C# implementation of BigInteger while the Java version uses the C/assembly language GMP library that has been tuned with hand-coded assembly language.

I ported Java's pidigits to C# to also use native GMP, and the results are promising, we now have a 4.7x speedup and the process size is one megabyte smaller. I was unable to test the Java version on my machine, as I could not find the native "libjgmp" library.

I wonder what the policy is for the language shootout to use external libraries. If its ok, I should contribute my port, if its not, the Java test should be rewritten to be a fully managed implementation.

If you run all the tests the gap between Java and Mono goes from 8 places, to 3 places; If you remove the two bad tests (Our Regex implementation, and the pidigits test) Mono is only one slot behind Java server; and if you also account for memory usage (but still account for all the tests), Mono comes ahead of Java.

Of course, we got homework to do: why is our Regex implementation so much slower?

Update: As it turns out, Mario Sopena pointed out that, another 25% performance improvement can be achieved if the implementations are similar. The C# sample does a lot more regex work than the Java implementation does. The Python implementation has further refinements on the algorithm that could improve the performance further.

Some Observations

It is interesting to see in the benchmarks the progression:

  • Close to the metal languages are the first tier (C, C++, D, Pascal, even Eiffel).
  • Compiled functional languages come next (OCaml, ML, Haskell, Lisp).
  • Java and Mono are on the next tier.
  • A big jump comes next: Erlang, Smalltalk, MzScheme.
  • Next big jump: Pike, Perl, Python.
  • Another jump: PHP, Javascript.
  • Tcl: a class on its own.
  • Ruby, last one.

There are a few rarities, like Fortran being in the same tier as Java and Mono, which probably means the tests for Fortran have not been tuned up, I would expect it to be in the same tier as C.

Also, am surprised by Ruby being the last on the list, I expected it to be roughly in the same range as Python, so I suspect that the tests for Ruby have not been tuned either. Update: my readers also point out that Ruby 1.9 will improve things.

Update: I just noticed that Eiffel is on the first tier, performance wise, but has pretty much all the properties and features of the third tier (garbage collection, strong typing, bounds checking). This means that you get the best of both world with it (and Eiffel's compiler is now also open source).

Language Productivity

And of course, at the end of the day, what matters is how productive you are writing code in a language. The Wikipedia is powered by PHP, Amazon by lots of Perl and C, Google uses Python extensively, and the stellar productivity that can be achieved with Ruby on Rails is hardly matched. So even if your language is slower than the first few tiers, to many developers and sites deploying software what matters is productivity.

Choosing between Mono's C# and Java, both languages being roughly on the same class, is a function of the libraries that you use, the ecosystem where the code will be developed/deployed and to some extent the language.

Alvaro's teammates at Sun have a difficult challenge ahead of them when it comes to the language: how to fix a language that has been so badly bruised by their generics implementation, their refusal to acknowledge delegates, the ongoing saga over the catastrophic closure proposals [1] and the lack of a strong language designer to lead Java into the future.

So even if we have a slow regular expression engine, we have working closures, iterators, events, the lock and using statements in the language and LINQ.

Of course, I wish them the best luck (in the end, Mono is a language-independent VM, and we are just as happy to run C# code as we are running Java code, which incidentally, just reached another milestone) and we certainly plan on learning from the open source Java VM source code.

Alternatively, you can use Mainsoft's Grasshopper to write C# code, but have it run on a Java VM.

[1] Am tempted to write a post about the mistakes that both Java closure proposals have. But it seems like it will be a waste of time, it feels like there is just too much hatred/NIH towards C# in that camp to make any real progress.

Posted on 28 Dec 2007


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