14 DAY TRIAL // While there’s no download link or an official announcement, the release notes of the upcoming Mono 4.0.0 framework have been published recently on the project’s website, and we have to admit that the changes are quite impressive, despite the fact that Mono is no longer a popular project on the open-source community.
According to the release notes, highlights of Mono 4.0.0 include adoption of Microsoft’s open source code, support for C# 6.0, an improved IKVM.NET implementation, initial support for PowerPC64 Little Endian (PPC64LE), lighter debugger overhead, and floating point optimizations. The upcoming release also removes support for old .NET frameworks.
What the Microsoft source code adoption means for Mono
The upcoming Mono 4.0.0 release will be the first to replace some of its core components with those released by the Microsoft Corporation under a free, open source license. These include Microsoft’s ReferenceSource drop, CoreFX, and CoreCLR. While Microsoft will make a revamped version of its .NET framework, Mono will still offer an API (Application Programming Interface) that tracks the desktop and server version of .NET.
“This means that most of the code that we have integrated comes from the ReferenceSource drop. In the future, we will deliver a ‘Mono Core’ along the same lines of .NET Core to allow the use of the Mono runtime with the new library distribution system that is being developed with CoreFX. In this release, we have either ported components that were either incomplete or buggy in Mono and were relatively easy to port to Mono.”
If you don’t know what Mono is, we can tell you that it’s an open source implementation of the .NET framework and programming language created by Microsoft. Mono lets developers create cross-platform applications that work on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X operating systems. More details about the upcoming release of Mono 4.0.0 can be found in the respective release notes.