Some time ago I expressed my feelings about C# ; to sum them up, I think it’s a nice language, by itself. It’s near enough C to be understandable by most developers who ever worked with that or C++ and it’s much saner than C++ in my opinion.
But I haven’t said much about Mono, even though I’ve been running GNOME for a while now and of course I’ve been using F-spot and, as Tante suggested, gnome-do.
I’ve been thinking about writing something about this since he also posted about Mono, but I think today is the best day of all, as there has been some interesting news in Java land.
While I do see that Mono has improved hugely since I last tried it (for Beagle), I do still have some reserves against Mono/.NET when compared with Java.
The reason for this is not that I think Mono cannot improve or that Java is technically superior, it’s more that I’m glad Sun finally covered the Java crap. OpenJDK was a very good step further, as it opened most of the important parts of the source code for others. But it also became more interesting in the last few days.
First, Sun accepted the FreeBSD port of their JDK into OpenJDK (which is a very good thing for the Gentoo/FreeBSD project!), and then a Darwin port was merged in OpenJDK. Lovely, Sun is taking the right steps to come out of the crap)
In particular, the porters project is something I would have liked to get involved in, if it wasn’t for last year’s health disaster.
In general, I think Java has now much more chances to become the true high-level multiplatform language and environment, over C# and Mono. This because the main implementation is open, rather than having one (or more) open implementations trying to track down the first and main implementation.
But I’d be seriously interested on a C# compiler that didn’t need Mono runtime, kinda like Vala.
what’s wrong with vala (or gjc)
The other really interesting thing about OpenJDK in that context is the Da Vinci VM, that’s being worked on by John Rose & others.