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Comment by daneel_w | Hacker News Reader

>"Yes, and this is tantamount to suggesting that Python developers should be satisfied with Python 2.0 (arguably 1.0 if you do F# development). Mono is effectively dead and abandoned, and it only exists now for historical reasons."

There's no suggestion being made here, directly or implied. I'm asking because I have no experience with .NET and am for the most part unfamiliar with both it and Mono, but my colleagues recently spent a fair bit of time to "de-dotNETify" a large chunk of our platform and move it towards running entirely on Mono, and I figured they knew what they were doing.

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Sorry! I shouldn't have assumed that it was a retort. Mono's latest supported .NET framework (v4.8) is four years old, or even older if you include the general movement to .NET Core, and it only supports C# versions <= 9.0 (via Roslyn), also 2-3 years old.

msbuild, the toolchain still used by Mono, has also been widely replaced by dotnet (CLI).

It's still (decreasingly) common to use Mono for cross-platform development, especially for Unity, which hasn't yet transitioned to .NET >= 7.0.

That makes it sound like Mono has fallen behind. I would say it like this:

The original .NET platform is now called .NET Framework.

.NET Framework was ( and is ) only available for Windows. Mono is an Open Souce project to implement a cross-platform implementation of .NET Framework. In addition to MacOS, Windows, and Linux, Mono targets iOS, Android, and WASM.

Microsoft released a second .NET platform alongside Framework and called it .NET Core. Unlike Framework, Core is cross-platform, and targets Windows, Linux and MacOS.

After .NET Core 3.1, the “Core” was dropped from the name. There has been .NET 5, .NET 6, and now .NET 7 but these are all just newer versions of .NET Core.

.NET Framework is still supported but there has not been a real release in several years. Framework is stuck at version 4.x and, since .NET 5, there is really one version of .NET again ( the descendent of Core ).

As Mono implements, .NET Framework ( not core ), it still implements .NET 4.x, like the “real” .NET Framework does. Mono “only supports C# versions <= 9.0 (via Roslyn), also 2-3 years old” because those are true of the “real” .NET Framework as well.

.NET Core ( dotnet at the CLI ) has replaced .NET Framework and ( by implication ) has replaced Mono as well. That is what I think the post above is trying to say.

Except, while it is true that the “real” .NET Framework has been replaced by .NET 5+ ( by .NET Core ), Mono has not been fully replaced.

Above, I said that .NET Core targeted Windows, MacOS, and Linux. It did not target iOS, Android, or WASM ( Blazor ). Well, .NET 7 targets all those platforms. How? Well, for Windows, MacOS and Linux it uses the original .NET Core runtime. For iOS, Android, and WASM it uses the runtime for Mono!

So, Mono is alive and well inside every version of .NET since 5. It will still be there in .NET 8 as well.

That said, when people say Mono, they mean the implementation of Framework released by the Mono Project. That version, as the post above implies, is pretty dated at this point.

> .NET Core ( dotnet at the CLI ) has replaced .NET Framework and ( by implication ) has replaced Mono as well. That is what I think the post above is trying to say.

dotnet build (from the modern .NET CLI) can compile .NET SDK projects that target legacy Framework versions. A csproj with a .NET.Sdk reference can use a TargetFramework of net48 or lower.

dotnet build times are an order of magnitude faster than Mono’s msbuild command, and migrated projects also receive the recent dotnet toolchain improvements (like automatic nuget restore, among many others).

Unity projects sometimes use dotnet's csc, even when the compiled libraries are executed with the Mono .NET (Framework!) 4.x runtime.

> So, Mono is alive and well inside every version of .NET since 5.

The official mono project is no longer under active development since the acquisition of Xamarin and the reassignment of core Mono team members to .NET Core.

Microsoft’s zombification of Mono by lifting code into .NET doesn’t suddenly make it alive. We’re not going to someday get a .NET 8 reimplementation inside Mono.

The "new .NET" (which used to be called .NET Core not long ago — the whole versioning scheme is a total fiasco on their part) is relatively cross-platform, but is not fully compatible with the old one (which is only available on Windows and hasn't been updated for many years). Your colleagues probably ported an old .NET project to Mono to move it off Windows. The usual thing these days is to port old projects to the "new .NET" instead, but it isn't always possible (because full compatibility between the two was a non-goal from the start).

Anyways, as dvzk has mentioned, Mono is a completely separate project and is not a replacement for current dotnet. Last time I checked, an experimental FreeBSD port was available, but MS doesn't seem to care very much about any of the BSDs.

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