Mono 1.0 Quickly Approaching

“We keep focused on our Mono 1.0 release, so those of us working on this release get to enjoy fixing bugs, while the others developers get bored to death implementing new code and boring new features.

To keep the excitement some folks have been doing performance tuning, the Mono C# compiler has been a good test bed to improve our performance. Various elements come into play: precompilation (which for compilation gives a 30% performance boost), VM improvements (method to assembly inlyining, optimizations, memory saving), class library improvements (reducing the memory size used by our classes) and in particular the compiler got tons of tune ups. Ben, Gonzalo Jackson, Paolo and Zoltan have all been working on this.

A lot of interesting data came from the mono --profile output on the compiler, and by reducing the memory usage of the compiler we were able to get 26% of performance improvements in a month. So now the compiler is down to 2.9 seconds in bootstrap time (without precompilation compilation, just pure JITing) on my machine...” [1]

[1] Small Mono Status Report. Miguel de Icaza. http://primates.ximian.com/~miguel/archive/2004/Jan-14.html