Mono 0.17

Release date: 09 Dec 2002

Hello!

Version 0.17 of Mono has been released.

There are plenty of new features, bug fixes, new classes, performance improvements, optimizations and much more available in this release.

Availability

Source code

http://www.go-mono.com/archive/mono-0.17.tar.gz
http://www.go-mono.com/archive/mcs-0.17.tar.gz

To install mono from source code you only need the first one (mono), as it contains pre-compiled versions of the compiler and the class libraries.

Packages for Linux

Precompiled packages with full debugging information in Dwarf-2 format (so you can use the soon to be released Mono debugger with it) is available for various distributions.

Packages are available either on the ‘Mono’ Red Carpet channel, or you can download your rpms, and source rpms from www.mono-project.com/download/

XSP ASP.NET Web server

http://www.go-mono.com/archive/xsp-0.2.tar.gz

No packages were made of the XSP server, but its so small that you should have no problem compiling and running it.

Stats

2605 cvs commits to the Mono repository since October 1st, an average of 37 commits per day including weekends.

212 commits to the Mono module. 1438 commits to the MCS module.

Mono Improvements

Work has begun to make the runtime run a finalizer thread and invoke all the finalizers from this thread. This is the same behavior as Java and the Microsoft runtime, but it is disabled on this build.

Integrated the Linux/s390 work from Neale Ferguson.

Beginning of the work for pre-compiling code (Ahead of time compilation) for Mono (based on the early work of Zoltan).

New option --noboundscheck for benchmark purposes, it disables array bound checks.

Uses mmap instead of SysV shared memory for the Windows API emulation layer.

Plenty of bug fixes, improvements and integration with the upper layer class libraries.

New exception handling code uses the GCC native support for stack-walking if available and gives big performance boost (15% on mcs bootstrap).

A lot of the work in the new release of Mono is required for the Mono Debugger (which will be released separately). The Mono debugger is interesting, because it can debug both managed and unmanaged applications, but it only supports the JITer for debugging.

Dick, Dietmar, Gonzalo, Martin and Paolo were in charge of most of these changes.

Compiler improvements

Many bug fixes as usual, better C# compliancy.

Performance improvements. The new release of the Mono C# compiler is 37% faster than the previous version (self-compile is down to 8 seconds). On my P4 1.8Ghz machine, the Mono C# compiler compiles (342,000 lines per minute).

Thanks to go Ravi and Martin for helping out with the bug fixing hunt.

Cryptography and Security classes

Sebastien Pouliot and Andrew Birkett were extremely busy during the past two months working on the cryptography classes, many of the crypto providers are now working

Jackson on the other hand helped us with the security classes, he said about those:

Writing security classes is the most exciting thing I have ever done, I can not wait to write more of them.

ASP.NET

We have now moved the code from the XSP server (which was our test bed for ASP.NET) into the right classes inside System.Web, and now any web server that was built by using the System.Web hosting interfaces can be used with Mono.

The sample XSP server still exists, but it is now just a simple implementation of the WorkerRequest and ApplicationHost classes and can be used to test drive ASP.NET. A big thanks goes to Gonzalo who worked on this night and day (mostly night).

Gaurav keeps helping us with the Web.Design classes, and improving the existing web controls.

ADO.NET

New providers are available in this release. The relentless System.Data team (Brian, Dan, Rodrigo, Tim and Ville) are hacking non-stop on the databse code. Improving existing providers, and new providers.

The new providers on this release:

  • Oracle
  • MS SQL
  • ODBC
  • Sybase
  • Sqlite (for embedded use).

Many regression tests have been added as well (Ville has been doing a great job here).

Brian also created a DB provider multiplexor (The ProviderFactory)

Stuart Caborn contributed Writing XML from a DataSet. Luis Fernandez contributed constraint handling code.

Also there is new a Gtk# GUI tool from Dan that can be used to try out various providers.

System.XML

Atsushi has taken the lead in fixing and plugging the missing parts of the System.XML namespace, many fixes, many improvements.

CodeDom and the C# provider

Jackson Harper has been helping us with the various interface classes from the CodeDOM to the C# compiler, in this release a new assembly joins us: Cscompmgd. It is a simple assembly, and hence Microsoft decided not to waste an entire “System” “dot” on it.

Testing

Nick Drochak has integrated the new NUnit 2.0 system.

Monograph

Monograph now has a –stats option to get statistics on assembly code.

CVS Contributors to this release

Alejandro Sanchez, Alp Toker, Andrew Birkett, Atsushi Enomoto, Brian Ritchie, Cesar Octavio Lopez Nataren, Chris Toshok, Daniel Morgan, Daniel Stodden, Dennis Hayes, Dick Porter, Diego Sevilla, Dietmar Maurer, Duncan Mak, Eduardo Garcia, Ettore Perazzoli, Gaurav Vaish, Gonzalo Paniagua, Jackson Harper, Jaime Anguiano, Johannes Roith, John Sohn, Jonathan Pryor, Kristian Rietveld, Mads Pultz, Mark Crichton, Martin Baulig, Martin Willemoes Hansen, Miguel de Icaza, Mike Kestner, Nick Drochak, Nick Zigarovich, Paolo Molaro, Patrik Torstensson, Phillip Pearson, Piers Haken, Rachel Hestilow, Radek Doulik, Rafael Teixeira, Ravi Pratap, Rodrigo Moya, Sebastien Pouliot, Tim Coleman, Tim Haynes, Ville Palo, Vladimir Vukicevic, and Zoltan Varga.

(Am sorry, I could not track everyone from the ChangeLog messages, I apologize in advance for the missing contributors).