Fedora meeting Mono Half-Way
Paul A Houle
ph18 at cornell.edu
Thu Dec 15 18:04:32 UTC 2005
Alan Cox wrote:
> Umm actually thats a very dangerous assumption. If the implementation in
> mono is wrong then every app in mono has the hole. We've seen this occur
> historically in other 'safe' languages. Also if there are bugs in libraries
> it uses they end up everywhere
>
>
Yeah, but if you find a bug in mono, java, python or some other
runtime you can patch it -- it's much less work than auditing the use of
strings and pointers in each applications.
As for library bugs, that's an area where Java does better than
C#. Half of it is that JNI is painful enough that people don't want to
use it, the other half is that "100% Pure Java" has encouraged a kind
of xenophobia -- rather than import thousands of libraries that aren't
thread-safe, the culture of Java is such that people have started in a
greenfield where, at the least, people were warned that their
applications would live in a threaded environment.
C# was designed to make it easy to use legacy libraries. Pandering
to lazy programmers is the Microsoft Way. C# is less (security,
pointer goofs, memory leaks, thread) safe than Java as a result.
> If you don't use the tools properly you don't get good results. Thats
> nothing to do with mono
Yeah, but some tools are hard to use properly. People have been
writing C for 30 years, and most still don't get it right.
A lot of programmers aren't happy with the options available for
writing Gnome apps, and this is one reason why some respected Gnomers
have gone down the mono path.
I totally agree that mono is in a legal minefield, and I respect
the decision to not carry it. In a lot of ways, Red Hat's hands are
tied.
Maybe we need really good Gnome bindings that work for Java/gcj...
I used to be skeptical about Java on the desktop, but Azureus has
made me a believer... It "just works" on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.
Speed, reliability and features compare favorably with native apps.
Every so often I think about learning how to program desktop apps,
but now that we've got AJAX and the Canvas element, I can do the
things I want to do with web apps. The desktop app situation on Unix
(never mind cross-platform) is a real mess. I regularly end up spending
hours tracking down and installing libraries when I want to install a
GUI app on Solaris or older Red Hat system. If I target the web
platform, my app works on all the computers I use without the fuss...
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