After years of work, Mono can now be built out of thedotnet/runtime repositoryin a .NET 5-compatible mode! This mode means numerous changes in the available APIs, managed and embedding, as well as internal runtime behavioral changes to better align Mono with CoreCLR and the .NET ecosystem.One area with multiple highly impactful changes to the runtime internals is library loading. For managed assemblies, Mono now follows the algorithms outlined onthis page, which result from the removal ofAppDomains and the newAssemblyLoadContextAPIs. The only exception to this is that Mono still supports bundl ...继续阅读 (7)

Note: This is a guest post by Jordi Mon Companys from Códice Software, a long-time Mono user, about how they used Mono to develop their flagship product.Plastic SCMis a full version control stack. This means Plastic SCM comprises a full repo management core, command line (until here it would be the equivalent to bare Git), native GUIs on Linux, macOS and Windows, web interfaces, diff and merge tools (the equivalent to Meld, WinMerge or Kdiff3), and also a cloud hosting for repositories. Add Visual Studio plugins, integrations with the major Continuous Integration systems, IDEs and issue tracke ...继续阅读 (4)

By virtue of using LLVM, Mono has access to a wide suite of tools and optimization backends. A lot of active research uses LLVM IR. One such research project, Souper, tries to brute-force a search for missed optimizations in our emitted code. The .NET community may have software projects that benefit from using Souper directly to generate code, rather than waiting for us to find ways to automate those optimizations ourselves. This algorithm can generate code that would be very challenging for a traditional compiler to find.The Mono .NET VM is a rather nimble beast. Rather than requiring all us ...继续阅读 (8)

During the 2018 Microsoft Hack Week, members of the Mono team explored the idea of replacing the Mono’s code generation engine written in C with a code generation engine written in C#.In this blog post we describe our motivation, the interface between the native Mono runtime and the managed compiler and how we implemented the new managed compiler in C#.MotivationMono’s runtime and JIT compiler are entirely written in C, a highly portable language that has served the project well. Yet, we feel jealous of our own users that get to write code in a high-level language and enjoy the safety, the lux ...继续阅读 (6)

Edited by Mark WaterburyNote: This is a guest post by Calvin Buckley (@NattyNarwhal on GitHub) introducing the community port of Mono to IBM AIX and IBM i. If you’d like to help with this community port please contact the maintainers on Gitter.You might have noticed this in theMono 5.12 release notes, Mono now includes support forIBM AIX and IBM i; two very different yet (mostly!) compatible operating systems. This post should serve as an introduction to this port.What does it take to port Mono?Porting Mono to a new operating system is not as hard as you might think! Pretty much the entire wor ...继续阅读 (12)

As you may know we have been working onbringing Mono to the WebAssembly platform. As part of the effort we have been pursuing two strategies; one that uses the new Mono IL interpreter to run managed code at runtime, and one that uses full static (AOT) compilation to create one.wasmfile that can be executed natively by the browser.We intend the former to be used for quickly reloading C# code and prototyping and the latter for publishing your final application, with all the optimizations enabled. The interpreter work has now been integrated into Mono’s source code and we are using it to develop ...继续阅读 (4)

Mono is complementing its Just-in-Time compiler and its static compiler with a .NET interpreter allowing a few new ways of running your code.In 2001 when the Mono project started, we wrote an interpreter for the .NET instruction set and we used this to bootstrap a self-hosted .NET development environment on Linux.At the time we considered the interpreter a temporary tool that we could use while we built a Just-in-Time (JIT) compiler. The interpreter (mint) and the JIT engine (mono) existed side-by-side until we could port the JIT engine to all the platforms that we supported.When generics were ...继续阅读 (5)

This Summer of Code, the Mono project had many exciting submissions. It’s been great to see what our applicants have been able to accomplish. Some were very familiar with the codebases they worked on, while others had to learn quickly. Let’s summarize how they spent this summer.CppSharp Defect Removal And General Feature WorkMohit MohtaandKimon Topouzidischose to address a number of bugs and add features to the code of CppSharp. Std::string was added, stacks were fixed, options were added, structure packing was added, and primitive types support was improved. They both seem to have learned a l ...继续阅读 (8)

Mono 5.2 is out in thestable channel!Check out ourrelease notesfor more details about what is new on Mono 5.2.This release was made up of nearly 1000 commits since Mono 5.0 and is the result of many months of work by the Mono team and contributors! ...继续阅读 (14)

As part of our ongoing efforts to improve Mono’s profiling infrastructure, in Mono 5.6, we will be shipping an overhaul of Mono’s profiler API. This is the part of Mono’s embedding API that deals with instrumenting managed programs for the purpose of collecting data regarding allocations, CPU usage, code coverage, and other data produced at runtime.The old API had some limitations that prevented some features and capabilities from being implemented. The upgrade to the API will allow us to:Reconfigure the profiling features at runtimeLook at the values of incoming parameters and return values ...继续阅读 (4)

Concurrent GCIn Mono 5.0 we are shipping a new operation mode for our Garbage Collector: Concurrent Garbage Collection.Traditionally, when Mono’s memory manager determined that it should perform a garbage collection, the collector had to pause all Mono running threads, perform the garbage collection, and once it was done, it resumed the execution of those threads.With concurrent garbage collection, we are able to perform collections on the old generation (what we call major collections) mostly concurrently with your application - it happens at the same time as your program is running. When ...继续阅读 (7)

Mono 5.0 is out in thestable channel!Highlights include shipping the Roslyn C# compiler and msbuild, enabling concurrent SGen garbage collection by default and continued integration of code shared with .NET.Check out ourrelease notesfor more details about what is new on Mono 5.0.This release was made up of over 2000 commits since Mono 4.8 and is the result of many months of work by the Mono team and contributors!New Linux package repository structureLinux users: we switched our package repositories to a new structure which means we’re now using a separate repository for each supported Linux di ...继续阅读 (3)

Up to now, Linux packages on mono-project.com have come in two flavours – RPM built for CentOS 7 (and RHEL 7), and .deb built for Debian 7. Universal packages that work on the named distributions, and anything newer.Except that’s not entirely true.Firstly, there have been “compatibility repositories” users need to add, to deal with ABI changes in libtiff, libjpeg, and Apache, since Debian 7. Then there’s the packages for ARM64 and PPC64el – neither of those architectures is available in Debian 7, so they’re published in the Debian 7 repo but actually built on Debian 8.A large reason for this i ...继续阅读 (5)

The Mono team is pleased to announce thatwe are a mentor organization in the Google Summer of Code 2017!Head over to theMono Summer Of Code blogto find out more. ...继续阅读 (17)

While Mono has had support for SIMD instructions in the form of theMono.SIMD API, this API was limited to run on x86 platforms..NET introduced theSystem.Numeric.VectorsAPI which sports a more general design that adapts to the SIMD registers available on different platforms.Themasterbranch of Mono now treats the various Vector operations as runtime intrinsics, so they are hardware accelerated. They are supported by both the Mono JIT compiler on x86-x64 platforms and via LLVM’s optimizating compiler on x86-64 and every other Mono/LLVM supported platform.We would love to see you try it and share ...继续阅读 (6)

Mono’s use of Reference Source CodeSince the first release of the .NET open source code, the Mono project has been integrating the publishedReference Sourcecode into Mono.We have been using the Reference Source code instead of theCoreFX, as Mono implements a larger surface area than what is exposed in there - Mono implements the .NET Desktop API.Integrating the code sometimes is easy, we replace the code in Mono with the reference source code. When the code is not exactly portable, we need to make it portable and either write missing code, or integrate some of the work that we did in Mono, wi ...继续阅读 (3)

When someone says multi-core, we unconsciously think SMP. That worked out well for us until recently when ARM announced big.LITTLE. ARM’sbig.LITTLE architectureis the first mass producedAMP architectureand as we’ll see next, it raises the bar for how hard multi-core programing is.A tale of an impossible bugIt all started with abug reportagainst a phone with such a CPU, the Exynos chipset used on Samsung phones in Europe. Apps created with our software were dying withSIGILLat all completely random places. Nothing could reasonably explain what was happening, and the crash was happening with vali ...继续阅读 (5)

This is the first in a series of posts I’ll be writing on the work we’ve been doing to improve the stability of Mono’slog profiler. All improvements detailed in these blog posts are included in Mono 4.6.0, featuring version 1.0 of the profiler. Refer to therelease notesfor the full list of changes and fixes.The problem we’ll be looking at today is a crash that arose when running the profiler in sampling mode (i.e.mono --profile=log:sample foo.exe) together with theSGen garbage collector.The ProblemSGen uses so-called managed allocators to perform very fast allocations from the nursery (generat ...继续阅读 (10)

In Mono 4.4.0, we improved the performance of GC handles by changing to a lock-free implementation. In this post we’ll take a look at the original implementation and its limitations, and how the new implementation solved these problems.BackgroundFor those unfamiliar, theGCHandleAPI provides access to the low-level GC handle primitive used to implement several types of “handles” to managed objects:Normal handlesprevent an object from being collected, even if no managed references to the object exist.Pinned handlesprevent an object from being moved in memory.Weak referencesreference an objectwit ...继续阅读 (5)

At Microsoft Build today, we announced that we are re-releasing Mono under theMIT licenseand have contributed it to the.NET Foundation. These are major news for Mono developers and contributors, and I am incredibly excited about the opportunities that this will create for the Mono project, and for other projects that will be able to benefit from this.Mono Runtime Released under MIT LicenseWhile Mono’s class libraries have always been available under the MIT license, the Mono runtime was dual-licensed. Most developers could run their apps on Windows, Linux or Mac OS X on the LGPL version of t ...继续阅读 (11)

At Microsoft Build today, we announced that we are re-releasing Mono under theMIT licenseand have contributed it to the.NET Foundation. These are major news for Mono developers and contributors, and I am incredibly excited about the opportunities that this will create for the Mono project, and for other projects that will be able to benefit from this.Mono Runtime Released under MIT LicenseWhile Mono’s class libraries have always been available under the MIT license, the Mono runtime was dual-licensed. Most developers could run their apps on Windows, Linux or Mac OS X on the LGPL version of t ...继续阅读 (10)

Mono 4.2 is out.Check out ourrelease notesfor details about what is new on Mono 4.2.0.This is the second Mono release that integrates large portions of code fromMicrosoft’s open sourced .NET code.This release was made up of over 2,338 commits since Mono 4.0.0 and as usual, it is our best release so far. Enjoy! ...继续阅读 (27)

Mono 4.2 is out in the [alpha channel](/download/alpha).Mono 4.2 is out in thestable channelCheck out ourrelease notesfor details about what is new on Mono 4.2.1.This is the second Mono release that integrates large portions of code fromMicrosoft’s open sourced .NET code.This release was made up of over 2,338 commits since Mono 4.0.0 and as usual, it is our best release so far. Enjoy! ...继续阅读 (17)

Mono 4.2 is out in the [alpha channel](/download/alpha).Mono 4.2 is out in thestable channelCheck out ourrelease notesfor details about what is new on Mono 4.2.1.This is the second Mono release that integrates large portions of code fromMicrosoft’s open sourced .NET code.This release was made up of over 2,338 commits since Mono 4.0.0 and as usual, it is our best release so far. Enjoy! ...继续阅读 (23)

Mono 4.0 is out.Check out ourrelease notesfor details about what is new on Mono 4.0.This is the first Mono release that contains code fromMicrosoft’s open sourced .NET code. We are only getting started with this work. We are swiftlymoving aheadin mono/master much more code that is being replaced and ported.This version also is the first one to ship with C# 6.0 enabled by default. Learn all about C# 6.0 in only eight minutes onthis presentation ...继续阅读 (28)

Mono 4.0 is out.Check out ourrelease notesfor details about what is new on Mono 4.0.This is the first Mono release that contains code fromMicrosoft’s open sourced .NET code. We are only getting started with this work. We are swiftlymoving aheadin mono/master much more code that is being replaced and ported.This version also is the first one to ship with C# 6.0 enabled by default. Learn all about C# 6.0 in only eight minutes onthis presentation ...继续阅读 (9)

Mono 4.0 is out.Check out ourrelease notesfor details about what is new on Mono 4.0.This is the first Mono release that contains code fromMicrosoft’s open sourced .NET code. We are only getting started with this work. We are swiftlymoving aheadin mono/master much more code that is being replaced and ported.This version also is the first one to ship with C# 6.0 enabled by default. Learn all about C# 6.0 in only eight minutes onthis presentation ...继续阅读 (14)

Hey everyone! The Mono team is pleased to announce thatwe are a mentor organization in the Google Summer of Code 2015!This is the eleventh year of Summer of Code for us, and we’re really excited to work with a new group of students.This is a great opportunity to spend the summer with a great community working on cutting edge open-source C# tools and frameworks. You can hone your development skills by working on large and complex codebases with experienced mentors, and get paid for your hard work too.If you’re aneligible student, the application period runs fromMarch 15-27. But don’t let that s ...继续阅读 (18)

Hey everyone! The Mono team is pleased to announce thatwe are a mentor organization in the Google Summer of Code 2015!This is the eleventh year of Summer of Code for us, and we’re really excited to work with a new group of students.This is a great opportunity to spend the summer with a great community working on cutting edge open-source C# tools and frameworks. You can hone your development skills by working on large and complex codebases with experienced mentors, and get paid for your hard work too.If you’re aneligible student, the application period runs fromMarch 15-27. But don’t let that s ...继续阅读 (9)

Hey everyone! The Mono team is pleased to announce thatwe are a mentor organization in the Google Summer of Code 2015!This is the eleventh year of Summer of Code for us, and we’re really excited to work with a new group of students.This is a great opportunity to spend the summer with a great community working on cutting edge open-source C# tools and frameworks. You can hone your development skills by working on large and complex codebases with experienced mentors, and get paid for your hard work too.If you’re aneligible student, the application period runs fromMarch 15-27. But don’t let that s ...继续阅读 (12)