[sword-devel] Porting to MS .NET framework

[David's Mailing-list and Spam Receiver]

On Thursday 05 June 2003 01:05 pm, John Baima wrote:
> Have you checked Mono (www.go-mono.com) ? The .NET platform, not just C#,
> solves a lot of problems and while there are some real issues with it today
> (e.g., no Palm OS), I think that it will prove to be a very popular
> environment in the years to come and it is not something that should be
> dismissed lightly.

In case you missed what I said earlier, windows is the only platform with a 
mature .NET implementation. Furthermore, unless Microsoft itself ports .NET 
to other platforms there will very nearly always exist the issues of what 
happens when MS starts enforcing it's patents. Also to be portable you have 
to run on more than just Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X (which is essentially 
BSD Unix with it's own unique windowing system which makes it much like 
linux). What about BeOS, or AROS (Amiga Research OS), V2 (though sword 
probably wont' be ported there since V2 only runs on floppy), Mac OS 9 and 
earlier, Palm OS, DOS for that matter, and other operating systems that don't 
have large portions of market share? To exclude operating systems simply 
because they're not very popular or your particular development framework 
isn't and won't be supported on them should also not be dismissed lightly. 

And yes I've looked at the Mono project and it's not finished yet. And while 
.NET I'm sure has some sort of benefit I would make sure that it won't fall 
by the wayside before jumping in with both feet. From what I've seen of the 
Windows longhorn previews, there are new windows frameworks coming out that 
aren't even compatible with win32 and I didn't even see any mention of .NET 
in the preview article I read. And back to portability, the current sword 
library compiles on at least both linux and windows *WITHOUT* changing any of 
the code. Essentially on those two platforms you don't have to do any sort of 
porting at all and changing things if you're in linux shouldn't break things 
in windows.

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