We keep focused on our Mono 1.0 release, so those of us working on this release get to enjoy fixing bugs, while the others developers get bored to death implementing new code and boring new features.
To keep the excitement some folks have been doing performance tuning, the Mono C# compiler has been a good test bed to improve our performance. Various elements come into play: precompilation (which for compilation gives a 30% performance boost), VM improvements (method to assembly inlyining, optimizations, memory saving), class library improvements (reducing the memory size used by our classes) and in particular the compiler got tons of tune ups. Ben, Gonzalo Jackson, Paolo and Zoltan have all been working on this.
A lot of interesting data came from the mono --profile output on the compiler, and by reducing the memory usage of the compiler we were able to get 26% of performance improvements in a month. So now the compiler is down to 2.9 seconds in bootstrap time (without precompilation compilation, just pure JITing) on my machine.
MonoDevelop, a port to Gtk# of SharpDevelop has been gaining momentum, and we have now moved it to the Mono CVS repository, although we are using Subversion for this project. This project has drawn a lot of attention and has helped improve and tune some of Gtk# which is quite mature nowadays.
On the other fronts, it is mostly bug fixing: the networking stack, the xml stack, the web services stack, asp.net is getting a lot of attention, and a lot of bug fixing.
Martin is taking a sabatical to complete the core of the debugger. Once he is done with these core changes, we will bind the UI to MonoDevelop while he completes the compiler Generics support, and maybe we will drag him back to the debugger for another pass of bug fixes.
Peter is working on integrating the Wine and Cairo, so we avoid having them fighting for the screen as we have them now. This will include updating our port of WineLib to the latest version of Wine.
The MacOS X port is working, but it needs testers on MacOS to try the latest editions of the Boehm GC do build fixes and so on. On the PowerPC, we are moving our focus to Linux.
Eric Durand and Francois Beauchemin from the Laval University will be implementing the compiler for regular expressions to CIL for the Mono runtime. This is part of their last semester work, and I will get to evaluate their work.
Posted on 14 Jan 2004