Re: C# applications on Mac OS X?

Uki,

> Microsoft licensing aside for a moment; does anybody have any success
> writing C#
> applications and moving the source-code across systems (Wintel,
> freeBSD Linux, Mac OS X ),
> just like Java?

Your best option at this point is Portable.NET. The last release, 0.6,
is available as .dmg installer and provides an interpreted IL execution
engine, C# compiler and tools and implementations of the Base Class
Libraries of the CLI/CLR standards. It does not provide a JIT compiler
but it is fast enough for general usage to develop/test components and
console apps. Rotor has been patched for Panther, the details are here
[1], the Rotor release is still maintained in the FreeBSD ports tree in
lang/cli and runs on the 5.x series (I don't use the 4.x releases so I
can not comment on that status). Mono is slowly getting OS X support in
its build trees. A PowerPC JIT compiler is in the source trees and
daily builds as well as on the must-have list for Mono 1.0, targeted
for 1Q/1H2004. A roadmap for Mono is available at
http://www.go-mono.com/mono-roadmap.html .

I've used all three on Jaguar and Panther. Rotor is the closest  to the
commercial implementation for Windows platforms, Portable.NET is
stable, fairly quick and the most usable from *NIX users view but
differs in its implementation compared to Rotor or Mono. Mono has more
features and gets more attention and does/will provide a native PPC JIT
compiler but is only now becoming usable on OS X.

One option to explore is writing in Java and compiling code for your
client using the J# compiler and the Java Class Library implementations
that are part of the Visual J# runtime add on for the .NET Framework.
Finally, explore Jeroen Frijters most excellent IKVM project which
compiles Java byte-code for execution on the CLR. His development
weblog is here: http://weblog.ikvm.net/

[1] http://rescomp.stanford.edu/~ejalbert/archives/2003/11/03.html


> Is Rotor a platform ready for the prime time, to just a toy (1.9
> million lines for that) for
> academics to show cool compilers?

I would not classify it as a toy however it's performance is somewhat
less than that of the .NET Framework commercial implementations. I've
had success doing simple Platform Invoke wrappers for Cocoa AppKit
Window Classes and writing native GUI applications for OS X/Aqua with
C#/Rotor. At this point, licensing and/or perception of the license
restrictions has not created a large community outside academic and
language implementor circles.


> Is there current on-going development in the area. Are books on C#
> apply to Rotor?

Check out: http://www.sscli.net/ for a community location for Rotor
projects and O'Reilly has the one and only book thus far on Rotor,
"Shared Source CLI Essentials".


> Finally, does licensing totally prohibits commercial use of it, or
> there are some dues that can be
> paid to Microsoft for the use of it? I have Visual Studio .NET
> licenses.

Licensing of the last release is limited to noncommercial purposes but
I suppose the CLR base dev or marketing team would not mind hearing
from you. At PDC, Peter Drayton and James Bach both commented on Rotor
being part of daily builds of the next version of the .NET Framework
and discussed possible schedules for release of Rotor v2. Hopefully a a
revised user license which allows commercial possibilities might emerge
or a roadmap and plan that engages it's user community. MacTech Journal
devoted it's cover this month to exploring the the CLI/CLR and the .NET
Framework... everything else can seemingly compile and run on OS X. If
OS X developers are starting to pay attention then change may yet come.
Only my opinion and my hope...

Regards,
Dave

[email protected]
http://www.morford.org/
"The purpose of computation is insight, not numbers."

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