Miguel de Icaza Calls For More Mono, C# Games

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Miguel de Icaza Calls For More Mono, C# Games

Miguel de Icaza presented this weekend at AltDevConf where he heavily promoted Mono and using C# for game developers...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTA1Njc

[snuwoods]

I think I slightly threw up.

[Saist]

I think I slightly threw up.

I did.

Seriously.... Miguel de Icaza just needs to let C# die a natural death as nature intended.

[benjamin545]

the mono project is a very important and beneficial project for the linux and open source community. but he is marketing it in the same light as java, html, or gtk. as if it is critical or central, or a legitimately useful tool to create with. what he and everyone else needs to realize is that mono is more akin to wine or samba. it is a tool to allow linux (or any other system in a similar disposition) to ingratiate into an otherwise hostile environment. it should be used to allow peoples existing .net code to run on linux or mac or whatever without a complete rewrite. to tell developers to go and make new linux centric applications or games with it is foolish at best.

[randomizer]

The CLR doesn't completely do away with memory problems. I monitor VMs running a mission-critical legacy application written in C# that starts off using ~70MB of memory and can bloat out to 1.5GB if it hasn't crashed for some other reason.

[XorEaxEax]

Well, given that Miguel Icaza is now earning his living by selling Monotouch and Mono for Android then obviously he will be feverishly pushing for more games being made with Mono/C#.

Not that there's anything wrong with that, but one should be aware that his message of how great Mono is for development is directly linked with his way of making money and thus hardly an objective opinion.

Still, despite the performance shortcomings of vm based managed languages like Mono there's certainly a large spectrum of games in which the loss of performance versus that of native code won't matter at all and then Mono/Java will do just as well.

The guy loves his Mono, so I hope he can successfully make a living out of it. Just as long as he stays away from the Linux desktop

[makomk]

The CLR doesn't completely do away with memory problems. I monitor VMs running a mission-critical legacy application written in C# that starts off using ~70MB of memory and can bloat out to 1.5GB if it hasn't crashed for some other reason.

Not just that, but at least historically speaking some code used to run fine under Microsoft's .Net CLR but leak memory like a sieve under Mono. In particular, there's a open source clone of the Second Life servers called OpenSim that's written in C# and it was unusable under Mono for ages. Miguel de Icaza helpfully investigated and accused the developers of spreading FUD because in his tests - which involved starting the server up but not actually connecting any clients to it or using it - Mono used less memory than Microsoft .Net. This was of course both true and completely useless. I think the OpenSim developers eventually tracked it down to the fact that Microsoft's .Net implementation could garbage collect certain threading-related resources safely but Mono required them to be manually freed.

The manpages are references, not documentation - but that distinction aside, let's test your assertion.

man DoesSaveUnders
The DoesSaveUnders macro returns a Boolean value indicating whether the screen supports save unders.

That's... not really helpful at all. What's a "save under"? Well, tough, no mention of that in the manpages.

You really don't want to be programming directly against Xlib anyway.