Linux and Main: Miguel de Icaza on Just About Everything

“LaM: Much has been made of your praise of
.NET, and it has caused a considerable stir. What’s it all
about?

“De Icaza: I’m a firm believer that rewriting
code is not a good idea. The bottom line is that I think that in
the future applications are going to be written using some
combination of mono with the existing technology. Just to give you
an example, Evolution is a very big application, 150,000 lines of
code, an extremely complex piece of code. We want to reduce the
time it takes us to maintain that code and we want to reduce our
time to market with new features. So instead of building new
features with a low-level language — no garbage collection, no
thread support, none of that — the idea would be to extend
Evolution in pieces in mono. This is one of the things I like best
about the whole .NET framework — you don’t have to do a complete
religious switch from your current platform to the new platform.
Instead, you can take your existing platform and you can extent on
it. It’s kind of like linking the biso interpreter into your
current application. That’s the way is works with mono. You link
Mono with your application and you start to extend it. Or you can
run full, standalone applications if you want. But my vision is
that I think that in the future people are going to realize that
the .NET framework has a lot to offer, and you’ll see many
applications written with this platform in mind rather than being
written against the old platform…”

Complete
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