GNU-Friends has an overview of Portable .NET, a key part of the DotGNU Project: “DotGNU aims to provide a complete alternative for all aspects of webservices, including user authentication (Virtual Identities), service directories, access, and security (SEE), as well as support businesses interested in using the Free DotGNU model.” Additionally, the Mono Project released slides of their presentations.
Overview of DotGNU Portable .NET
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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looks like the australian law provides some support
here ? .. It allows for competing products to be dev’d
from existing product .. So duplicating the MS API can
be legal …
And the law precedes the license .. which is sort of
good ..
for user authentication (Virtual Identities),
will it be interop with Liberty Alliance Project?
http://www.projectliberty.org/
If the Liberty project is interested in co-operation with
DotGNU they should contact the dotgnu Auth team
[email protected]
IIRC they already had a demo which could auth with Yahoo,
and ESPN .. MDS had hacked it up …
The portable.Net component which was released last weekend
and is rumored to run on almost all unixes (including cygwin
and Mac OS X)
Get it from http://www.southern-storm.com.au/portable_net.html if you have about 15 minutes to build it and love the way /usr/local fills up
Or get .debs from ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/dotgnu-pnet/debian/
And last but not the least watch out for annoucements on
http://freshmeat.net/projects/pnet/ (by the one and only
Rhys Weatherly)
I know that dotGNU has a much wider scope than the Mono project, but I would like to know how the VMs and compilers compare to each other. Which VM is faster? Which is more feature complete? Which one has the better garbage collection?
I really hope that the dotGNU vm has a decent garbage collector. Mono still uses a “conservative” garbage collector. YUCC!
mono is a clone of the ms CLI.
dotGNU is the framework for network communication and password authorization. it is quite cool actualy, it allows a fully decentralized password authorization system that the user has control over where their info is kept(localy or remotely).
>> I know that dotGNU has a much wider scope than the Mono
>> project, but I would like to know how the VMs and
>> compilers compare to each other. Which VM is faster?
>> Which is more feature complete? Which one has the
>> better garbage collection?
We at dotGNu don’t believe in speed wars … We don’t pay
people $$$ to develop Portable.Net … It’s more of a
community affair for people .. I got involved just coz
I was able to compile it in my box and was almost the
first person to send in a patch …
Rhys’s rules
1) Speed wars are bad .. optimizing for benchmarks slows down
real apps….
2) Optimizing compiler output is more important than a
runtime’s speed
So Portable.Net is fast in most boxes , while mono is
really fast on x86 … Portable.net is low memory usage
(under 200k heap + 10 k stack for HelloWorld) … The
compiler is extremely fast compiling the standard libs
(mscorlib.dll) under 10 seconds on my P III 350 box ..
And we’re building a C compiler for .NET , a Parrot (perl6)
output codegen (We have gotten 17 new opcodes for DotGNU
support into Parrot CVS) … Someone is building a PHP
compiler for Portable.Net … Robert Calco has been pushing
the Ruby’s parser into generating IL … I am doing the
Java compiler plugin for cscc …
Treecc is being integrated to simplify GCC front-end
development … Rhys actually wrote a Modula2 compiler
to test treecc .. It now outputs C,C++,C#, Java, and
Ruby code for the tree definitions … Python is in the
pipeline ..
The Jabber team are waiting for DotGNU to finish their
Xml parsers before jumping on to help with the actual
Jabber::Middleware we intend to use for communication..
So it’s sort of different … And as we often quote (Rhys)
“make it work, then make it work better”