What Mono 4.0.0 prepares for us

Recently, many have been discussing the recent discoveries of CoreCLR and CoreFX from Microsoft. Let me remind you that the CLR core and the implementation of the .NET base classes are now open, cross-platform and distributed under MIT. This way, you can build your own runtime version, which will work under Windows, Linux and Mac. And many were tormented by the question: what will happen to Mono now? Recently there were drafts of Mono 4.0.0 Release Notes , from which we can learn about the future plans of the company Xamarin. So, today in the room:

• Adoption of Microsoft's open source code
• Floating point optimizations
• We dropped support for the 2.0, 3.5 and 4.0 assemblies
• Updated IKVM

Let's discuss the upcoming changes in more detail.

Microsoft Source Code Adoption

It was probably one of the most burning questions: what will Mono do with Microsoft open-source projects? Now we know the answer: Mono in version 4.0.0 will switch to CoreCLR and CoreFX. In my opinion, this is just wonderful, since the old implementation of the .NET kernel in Mono had a series of flaws. Now we will have a single code base of the core and base classes everywhere - a great cause for joy.
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Floating point optimizations

Historically, Mono has used the highest precision available for floating-point calculations. On the one hand, this is good, but on the other, it has a negative impact on performance. In the new release, 32-bit mathematics will be used for 32-bit floating point operations, making the code more efficient.

Dropped Support for Old Frameworks

The API from .NET 2.0, .NET 3.5 and .NET 4.0 will no longer be supported, Mono completely moves to .NET 4.5.

Updated IKVM

Let me remind you that IKVM is a Java implementation for Mono and the Microsoft .NET Framework, that is, in fact, we are able to convert jar to dll and run Java code under .NET. The idea is good, but the state of the library is still far from being able to be used in real large projects. It can not but rejoice that the work on the library is underway: if it is brought to a sane level, this opens up broad possibilities for using Java-libraries in the .NET-world.

What will happen next?

The notes on Mono 4.0.0 are now at a very rough stage, but they already look promising. And Miguel promises us that in the near release much more will be implemented:



We will follow the updates and enjoy the advent of a bright open cross-platform .NET-future. =)

Additional links

• Mono 4.0.0 Release Notes
• The copy-paste process of source code on Trello (thanks to kekekeks )