Uhm... really? From what I know it's OS independant code that runs in a runtime environment just like Java. It's make the code architecture independant so Microsoft can easily port Windows and apps to, let's say, UltraSparc or PowerPC, etc.

I love my GTK-1.2 desktop -got over 500 programs to choose from which all run on just this tiny set of libs. Anybody interested in helping add bidi and utf8 support to GTK-1.2? Screw all that bloated gnome and qt stuff...

If you want a lighweight desktop with one set of libs then why don't you just use the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries?

Thanks for the tip -I hadn't heard of the foundation libs. Problem is there are only about 20 compatible apps listed and they are mostly incomplete. I already have about 500 GTK-1.2 apps that cover nearly everything you can think of. There are some modern GTK2 apps which it would be nice to backport. I have backported a few apps, but not as many as I'd like to. My point is that there never was a very good reason to stop using the GTK-1.2 libs. There were a few very well known bugs. Why didn't they just fix them instead of starting over and changing the API? Gnome is very bloated, KDE is very bloated, even GTK2 apps are very slow compared to GTK-1.2 apps. I use the GTK-1.2 version of sylpheed for e-mail. It takes less than 1 second to start up (on a 700Mhz machine!). Sure there are other lightweight toolkits out there, but there are none that have so many mature aplications available as GTK-1.2.

mono and .NET: easy to program in, nice and shiney, good integration with everything......
exicutables 5 times the size of equivelent written in C++ with GTK+ (or 3 times the size of one using QT)
needs 2 times teh ram to run, and has a bloat factor of 100000

case in point... windoze vista was written mainly in .NET

That would be a great point...if it were true. However, Vista is not written "mainly in .NET." It's written primarily in unmanaged C and C++, just like the all previous versions. In fact, by one estimate, only 4% of Vista was written in .NET.

Huh? Aren't they using their own version of C? It's called C# (prenounce: See Sharp)

Not for their big, established products like Windows and Office. Both of those are huge code bases that pre-date C# and .NET by quite a bit. To rewrite them in C# just wouldn't make sense. That would be like Linus deciding to scrap the entire kernel and start over in C++.

And to call C# "their own version of C" isn't even remotely accurate. C# was created to be the primary language for .NET. Aside from shallow syntactical similarites, C# has virtually nothing in common with C. It's a lot closer to Java than to anything else.

Well... that would actually be stupid, but given the history of Microsoft I've actually gotten used to stupidity on their behalf so... ;)

Here is a very rough comparison of MS and Non-MS technologies.

Windows <==> Linux, Xorg, Various network utilities, etc.
C# <==> Java (The language)
.Net <==> J2EE (The framework)
Visual Studio <==> Eclipse, Netbeans, etc.

<soapbox mode>

As someone already stated, C# was created to kill Java. MS removed some of the best features of Java and replaced them with a "new and improved" version, that is so royally messed up that they have had to add all kinds of kludges to it. It's like the language was designed by someone who didn't have a clue about object oriented principles. By the time they realized it was a piece of junk, they couldn't do anything about it without upsetting millions of lines of production code. Guess what. They changed it anyway with .Net 2.0. If users wanted to use the new features of 2.0 they had to convert a whole bunch of stuff. Well, they still had a piece of junk, so they decided to try another Java killer and came out with J++. Same song, second verse. Or hundredth verse, I've lost count.

FWIW, I have experience in Java, VB.Net, and C#.Net, among several other technologies. I spent too much time in MS shops, and thankfully I am now in my third week in a shop that has mostly iSeries and RedHat servers, with the language of choice on RedHat being Java. (Unfortunately, the desktops are standardized on WinXP.)

Concerning Mono, I think it's ok to use it as a migration tool, but the code should be replaced ASAP. Mono is a (only) fair emulation of an inept system that was created solely to muscle out a system whose primary fault was that it was not controlled from Redmond.

</soapbox mode>

I think you mean J#. J++ is back from the VisualStudio6 days (maybe farther back, but it was in VS6's time when I first got into serious programming). J++ was a lame attempt to hijack Java by introducing a Microsoft-only API which the IDE "strongly encouraged", thus neutering the portability of such software. Then Sun walked up and neutered Microsoft's plan to steal Java. J# is a (loose?) implementation of the Java language on the .NET platform. I believe it was mainly created to lure Java developers over to the dark side and to allow easy reuse of pre-existing code as part of an overall strategy of .NET migration. With C# there really is no need for a .NET Java implementation other than drawing people away from Java.

You are right and my bad. I should have said J# instead of J++. Both, however had the same underlying goal; to get millions of developers to write massive amounts of code that could only run on MS platforms.

I vote contra, because Java already does what mono does, so what is the point of making a Microcruft standard a Linux standard when the same thing has already been done by Sun.

[/QUOTE]
Is that why it's so VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY slow?

It's all in our own interest ofcourse (or so I think... ). Think about the hardware support, websites supporting web standards instead of IE, the influence Microsoft has on the industry (trusted computing and NSA keys in hardware accelerated encryption), the amount of games brought over to Linux.

It's all in the userbase really...