On Tuesday of last week we branched Mono for the 2.0 release; Packages are being QAed for our first release candidate and will be available next week. Bug fixing for the final release will happen on this branch.
Meanwhile, the excitement continues on trunk. Zoltan today merged the Linear IL branch.
The Linear IL code has been under development for two years and eight months and it was an effort that we started to address some of the main limitations in our current JIT design. Some of these limitations in the old design made it very hard to bring some code generation optimizations into the JIT, or made the optimizations not as effective as they could have been.
The new JIT engine will debut in Mono 2.1, later this year. Now that Linear IL is the default, the entire JIT team will focus on tuning the engine and extracting more performance out of it. But even without tuning, the new engine is already performing very well as you can see in the results comparing the engines.
Additionally, a number of creative ideas that we have to improve Mono all depended on doing this switch. We have a few surprises for developers in the next coming months.
Congratulations to Zoltan for getting this work merged.
Posted on 22 Jul 2008