Re: about OcamIL

[Sylvain Le Gall <sylvain@le-gall.net>]

On 07-05-2010, Dmitry Bely <dmitry.bely@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Thursday 06 May 2010 06:43:21 am Dmitry Bely wrote:
>>> Ironically it's also not entirely true. F# works well under Mono/Unix.
>>>
>> A little off topic, but how is Mono/Unix these days?  Last I checked (>2 years
>> ago) it implemented the basic libraries and runtimes but had terrible
>> performance.  Is it now on par with Windows?
>
> It's hard to say: personally I don't use Mono (neither Windows nor
> Linux) yet. But indeed I was overoptimistic. Mono still uses Boehm GC
> so it should be slow enough. Nevertheless things are changing:
>
> http://www.mono-project.com/Compacting_GC
> http://lists.ximian.com/pipermail/mono-devel-list/2009-November/033421.html
>
> Let's wait for mono 2.8 and see how the new generational GC works.
>

I can give you a very personnal POV, I don't really use Mono but I
attended various demonstration of it, by Miguel de Icaza, some people
from Second Life and some people from the me Moonlight project, back in
February at FOSDEM 2010. Don't take my opinion for sure.

Overall the effort about Mono is impressive but it doesn't yet match
C#/.NET in term of performance and stability. During the demonstration a
lot of things didn't work (video in Silverlight, compilation of various
compilation unit). 

I was not very impressed by the whole Mono, I acknowledge the effort
toward a compatibility with .NET. But since the other end doesn't seem
cooperative, they will have a lot of work ahead.

Concerning F#/Mono, I am not sure that the Mono version will be
supported in the future. Now F# is a first class language in Visual
Studio, so I suppose they will put a bigger effort to integrate F# with
Visual Studio (e.g. to be able to build GUI application using a GUI
builder...) This integration will probably be a higher priority than the
Mono compatibility and probably will reduce it. 

My 2 cents,
Sylvain Le Gall

ps: this is really a personnal POV and guess, I am not a .NET/Mono
expert, only someone who have some interests in it.