Getting to Know Mono

摘要

If you have ever written an application for the Linux desk-top, or even looked into writing one, you are familiar with the multitude of language bindings available for the vari-ous GUI toolkits. This is one of the strengths of writing GUI applications for Linux; you are not locked in to a particular programming language. Unfortunately, you quickly come to realize that different language bindings offer varying amounts of API completeness. A widget you used from one language isn't yet supported when using a different language. This is the downside of supporting multiple languages. The amount of work needed to maintain an API increases with each set of bindings. A change or update to the original API must be replicated in each of the language wrappers. Now imagine a single GUI toolkit, accessible from any programming language without having to rely on API wrappers―a toolkit that offers the same functionality to every language that uses it. Mono has the potential to provide this, plus much more, by offering programming language independence as well as programming language interaction.