[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.

[smosher_]

> 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.

That is precisely my point. We're still doing it and we will be doing it for the foreseeable.

For example:

> It doesn't mean DirectX 6.1 is a great 3D game platform [...]

If your opinion is DX6.1 didn't work, I think what you really mean is "isn't the best option under ideal circumstances today." I would agree with that assessment for mono, but "cross-platform" is not something anyone puts next to "ideal circumstances" when it comes to the work involved in making it happen.

> It feels like we're debating whether the Mono bullshit was waist deep or merely knee deep.

There is certainly bullshit to contend with in mono, but there's bullshit in Microsoft's too. And every other platform throughout the ages as you helpfully illustrated. A topical example is porting a game in C++ vs. writing working code for mono. C++ is uncontested as a working technology, but I would pick Unity on mono in a heartbeat for that task. So where is the line, really? In development all you can do is keep above it and all the better if you can keep your socks dry.

I get the impression you are very unimpressed with mono's failings and have written it off and want to complain about it. That's fine but it doesn't mean the hyperbole you've chosen to express yourself is accurate.

[tacos]

If the goal of the Mono project were to provide a cross-platform scripting language for games then, with obvious caveats about all the well-known problems, sure, "that worked."

But the goals and history of the project were clear. Meanwhile if you tried to run a desktop app on Mac or a server app on Linux, it was a total fucking debacle.

Xamarin punted desktop, then they punted server, and they landed on mobile. And even then they couldn't keep up or keep compatible.

"It worked" much the same way "the Space Shuttle worked." Awesome effort, cool project, didn't meet spec, didn't meet goals, and it had one nine of uptime before it repeatedly crashed.

I remain grateful for the work they did. But I'm glad things are moving forward sensibly now. Because unlike WINE, they really never got close.