[tacos]

The Mono team did an amazing job, and they actually had a lot of support deep within Microsoft all along. But yeah, I think it's okay to say "it never really worked."

(And there's nothing wrong with being a port factory that deals with obscure path issues all day. That's why they give you a paycheck...)

Still, Xamarin is doing a LOT more than just Mono, much of it extraordinary.

Also delivering something that actually works is an ego boost. Probably attracts the "right" kind of employee for the task, too.

[smosher_]

> But yeah, I think it's okay to say "it never really worked."

I don't. I mean yes mono <4.0 has a lot of problems, but it works well enough for me to shell out money for applications running on mono and be happy about it.

[tacos]

I literally saved two businesses as favors to friends. One by replacing a Mono app on Mac with Windows running in a VM. The second by doing the two hours of config work they were afraid of to host on Windows Server instead of a Linux box. (At the same damn price!)

Xamarin did an immense amount of work pushing that boulder up a hill. Glad you got results, but frankly it did a lot of damage to a lot of people. I say this as a Microsoft fanboy and someone who deployed sites you've heard of on Mono + Postgres + CentOS.

In the last year or two many .NET vendors went from "yes, it works on Mono!" to "it should work but no support." This indicates the formal death of the ecosystem to anyone but apologist hobbyists and thankfully we've gotten to a better place now.

[smosher_]

> This indicates the formal death of the ecosystem to anyone but apologist hobbyists and thankfully we've gotten to a better place now.

A couple of things. First: "This", so far, is anecdotal and doesn't indicate much of anything, really. For something concrete, look at Unity. Maybe you haven't used anything built with it, but everything I've seen come out of it works just fine.

Second: Apologist hobbyists? That's not true and needlessly insulting. If your aim is to just marginalize anyone with a differing opinion please don't expect me to take you seriously.

[tacos]

Um... Unity spent the last three years trying to find a way to pry themselves off Mono. Unity "works" because devs using Unity work their asses off tiptoeing around a really old version of Mono. You picked about the worst possible example to make your point.

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/unity-5-and-mono-runtime.23...

[smosher_]

Unity works though. Unity games have a much better batting average in my experience than C++ ports, and I have more problems with "cross-platform" games and other applications written in Java.

These aren't hobbyists and they're not definitely not apologists. They're making good money on it. If it was as bad as you say, why bother with the Linux/Mac support to begin with? That's just noise compared to the Windows market.

I also have to point out that an ancient version of mono being problematic doesn't mean mono failed or doesn't work. By my measure, even that old version of mono works.

I don't know what your metric is. People ship working code and make money in parts of the market they wouldn't otherwise have. But I guess that doesn't count in the face of what? your decision not to use it?

[tacos]

I'm not sure what your point is here. Talented programmers have been releasing stuff that works great on shitty platforms forever. If the money is there, you work around the nonsense, warts and all.

It doesn't mean DirectX 6.1 is a great 3D game platform, nor AmigaDOS an awesome place to make a video editor, nor Mono under Unity the bees knees for an iOS game.

It feels like we're debating whether the Mono bullshit was waist deep or merely knee deep. Which doesn't matter because Xamarin and Microsoft just pulled out a giant firehose and washed everything clean.