It’s things like this that show why I love Mono so much.
- Quick transition for Windows developers to open source platforms such as Linux/GNOME
- Migration path for existing C/C++ applications–you don’t have to port all the code at once, you can mix managed and unmanaged bits and pretty quickly create Mono bindings to your C-based libraries. Notice I didn’t say “C# bindings”. As Miguel points out, any language in the .NET framework can make use of these.
- C# itself is a great language that makes a developer more productive
In a nutshell, Mono pulls it all together. It bridges the gap between Windows developers and Linux/GNOME (and believe me, there are scores of Windows developers out there are are intrigued by open source, but are intimidated by the C GNOME APIs and don’t really want to take the time to learn something like Python). Give them a familiar language (C#), an IDE, and bindings to our platform and they’ll start the transition.
Mono bridges the language gap, too. I think a developer should be able write GNOME applications in Java, or C#, or maybe even VB.NET. And you should be able to use the large existing codebase while extending it with Mono.
Tags: Mono
