The DotGNU project has proudly announced its first CD-ROM release.You can now compile and run C# and C applications that use the base class libraries, XML, and System.Windows.Forms under multiple operating systems. Webservice programs can be executed in a webservice server on top of a highly scalable distributed middleware, and they can be integrated with a web-based GroupWare suite.
The CD-ROM includes documentation, full source code, and packages for GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, and MS Windows. You can get the gzip’ed ISO image (219 MB) as a BitTorrent download, or purchase the CD from CheapBytes.
Newsforge also carries the announcement.
not that Mono is bad or anything, but all mono can do is some C# stuff…dotGNU has all the infrastructure built. to bad the Mono guys did not want to work with dotGNU in the beginning ( I was involved with that communication for awhile on the dotGNU side). Portable.net is a nice solution though.
Wow, that is huge. Is that number accurate?
In any case, I periodically cvs update DotGNU and mono and both are making good progress(too bad they couldn’t collaborate more though). DotGNU’s winforms implementation is interesting because it only relies on System.Drawing instead of Wine which Mono’s implemention currently relies on. DotGNU Winforms binaries will run unmodified on windows but not vice versa.
Another interesting development with DotGNU is the ability to compile c code to IL. I’m not sure how useful this is at the momement because they’ll still need to get glibc compiled to IL and even then I don’t know the exact usefullness of it.
Congratualations to the DotGNU team and especially Rhys Weatherly on the hard work that has gone into this. Next step is to get Sharpdevelop running on it:)
@debman – Yeah, it’s too bad there couldn’t have been more cooperation.
One cool thing about portable.net is that the compiler is written in c unlike mono which is written in c#, so there is no bootstrap problems on portable.net and the compiler is faster and doesn’t have a huge footprint. Also, Rhys has a lot of #ifdef’d code so that scaling down the runtime to fit on embeddeds should be easier.
all it needs now is a nice development suite and it can be a very powerful development tool. the fact that programs will run on windows might make it more popular for cross platform development than VS.net…wouldn’t that be a nice gut punch to Microsoft 🙂
yes, the size of the iso image is correct.
Besides the source tarballs for portable .net and some other tools part of the DotGNU effort ( phpgroupware, DGEE etc.) it also contains binary packages for many different linux distributions and also for win32.
The CD also contains many articles about what has been achieved so far, about System.Windows.Forms, the compiler design of treecc and and and…
it’s really worth a download, even if you don’t plan on actively using it, if you are just a little bit interested, give it a go.
in my last comment I meant “the compiler design of portable .net using treecc”.
btw. it also contains articles about free software/business in general.
I don’t really know much about DotGNU, but I am wondering if it will work with the GTK# (gtk-sharp)? Just had to ask, because the Mono will never work on FreeBSD 5.x and I hope the DotGNU will.
Try to use ‘mint’ instead of mono.
ie:
$ mint myApp.exe
It may work. Have not tried it. But the mint program is an interpreted version. Wich were made to be used where the mono could not be ported to fast. Mint is a interpreter, so you wont get the just-in-time things I think. It is slower than mono too.
> Another interesting development with DotGNU is the
> ability to compile c code to IL. I’m not sure how useful > this is at the momement because they’ll still need to get
> glibc compiled to IL and even then I don’t know the exact
> usefullness of it.
I’m currently compiling libjpeg with Portable.net (admittedly with a couple of “inline” keywords commented out). But it would be really useful if we could build
up on such existing libraries instead of going and re-inventing the wheel *again*..
Though I should say … it does allow you to use all C# static methods .. from C or to write functions accessible from C in C# (to use .NET specific junk).
Gopal
So, we have Mono and dotGNU/pnet..
Anyone have a comparison of those?