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by Sir_Substance 3773 days ago
...Xamarin studio isn't a competitor to Visual Studio?

That's all I know that Xamarin makes, so I think this article is going a bit over my head, but it'll be a shame if I suddenly need a Microsoft account to use it. I do like diversity in my language tooling.
5 comments
Coincoin 3773 days ago
Xamarin is not about Xamarin Studio. It's about the iOS and Android runtimes. Thanks to its ability to take full advantage of AOT compilation, the performance difference is staggering compared to Mono. Also it needs to JIT in less situations, which is a big plus on iOS since JITing is prohibited on that platform "for security reasons".
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douche 3773 days ago
It is bad enough that you have to keep a Mac around with XCode on it to build any iOS apps now.
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josteink 3773 days ago
> ...Xamarin studio isn't a competitor to Visual Studio? That's all I know that Xamarin makes

Last I checked, that was just a forked and rebranded Mono Develop with Xamarin's main product line (iOS and Android support for .NET) bundled in.

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hokkos 3773 days ago
Visual Studio doesn't run on Mac OS to make iOS apps, VS Code is still only an editor not an IDE. So Xamarin could be very useful for MS.
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Sir_Substance 3773 days ago
I'm not debating that Xamarins products are useful to Microsoft, I'm questioning the assertion that they haven't just consumed a competitor.
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mynameisvlad 3773 days ago
Considering Microsoft has no Mac IDE, I'm not sure how Xamarin could be considered a competitor.
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Sir_Substance 3773 days ago
...because Visual Studio is a C#/C++ IDE that works on Windows, and Xamarin Studio is also a C#/C++ IDE that works on Windows?

Xamarin Studio is a swiss army knife. I don't know about your use case, but I use it under the name Monodevelop on linux (not really sure what that association is) and as Xamarin studio on windows. For my use case, it's a C# and C++ IDE for desktop development, same as visual studio.

It's certainly not a MacOS only product, it supports all three platforms including windows.

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pjmlp 3773 days ago
Have you ever used .NET on its own platform?

Mono only supports a subset of the whole stack.

No sane .NET developer would use Mono on Windows, its purpose is .NET portability to other OSes.

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Sir_Substance 3773 days ago
Xamarin studio can be run against .net on windows, it's not mono specific.
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assocguilt 3773 days ago
Ask them about Alan Truing - he kept his work secret so should have had his career ruined by the likes of you.
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cbd1984 3773 days ago
> Alan Truing

Poor guy. His name autocorrects to one of the best-known names in computing.

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