Some folks have been using Mono as a research platform recently (virtual machine, dynamic code generation, code optimization, profiling, recompilation, tuning, security) and more.
Duncan told me that he met with a few folks from a University during his holidays and they said that they chose Mono over Rotor for research because Mono has a real JIT as opposed to Rotor's simple JIT, and we also have a solid base for optimizations with our SSA platform.
Many areas in Mono can be improved for people who approach it for research though. We should improve these areas. We need better documents in a per-function basis, a lot of the time we do not have those and unless you are familiar with the code it might be hard to understand on a first read what things do. We also need to document the fields used in our structures better.
Now, the good news is that if you are a dedicated hacker, in a few weeks you can understand the JIT engine and implement some nice optimizations. Recently Patrik Torstensson came back to hack the JIT engine and implemented various optimizations (signed div constant fodling, inlining of common opcodes, peephole optimizations), as well as fixing various hard bugs.
Massimiliano Mantione as part of the hiring interview for the JIT engine wrote Arrays Bound Check elimination.
Posted on 06 Jan 2004