[Mono-dev] Ideas for Mono on Windows

Jonathan Chambers joncham at gmail.com
Tue Nov 11 17:10:12 EST 2008

Hello All,
      Mono on Windows has never been easy. However, lately things to have
continually gotten worse (or I and others have just gotten more annoyed).
Setting up an environment takes a lot of effort for a normal windows
developer. Cygwin and the whole Makefile based process is very foreign for
Windows developers. Not to mention the busted make in cygwin and cygwin
issues on Vista (amd64). Most people have had enough interest in building
mono on windows that they took the time to work things out (usually at least
a day). But that's just the first time; try setting everything up again on a
different machine or updating your cygwin and things start over.

I see the basic issues as:

1) Cygwin development environment is less than ideal. It's foreign to most
Windows developers and is a barrier to entry for most people.
2) Debugging is mostly impossible. gdb seems to provide little help on
Windows (echoed by others on #monodev)
3) Compilation takes forever. I am working on a Dual Quad Core machine (8
cores) at 3.6 Ghz. The mono build process still takes hours on my machine.
This may be aggravated by virus scanners or other similar software, but the
fact remains that all Windows users run virus scanners.

As to not just be a complainer, I am offering some suggestions/ideas and
hoping for others to do the same (or at least critique mine ;-)). Before I
offer any suggestions, I think we need to balance between two things. One is
making life easy for the mono build/package team to produce a Windows
product. It's not real easy now, but we shouldn't make it any harder. The
second thing is making life easy for those who wish to work/contribute to
mono on Windows. This second item is tough at this point.

1) We should consider using MSVC as the default compiler for C code on
Windows. I can compile the entire Visual Studio solution for the runtime in
minutes. It takes 20-30 seconds if I do a parallel build. We can also use
the Visual Studio debugger on Windows, which IMO is betten than gdb on

2) Two propositions for the class libraries have been mentioned previously.
One is a lightweight, 'managed make' system that could be run easily on
windows in place of all the build infrastructure provided by cgywin. This
obviously allows us to keep using Makefiles on other platforms and keep a
unified build process, but requires someone write the tool (and maintain
it). Another option is to moved to MSBuild/xbuild for the class libraries.
This would change the build process on all platforms, and require some
fixing of our current xbuild tool. MSYS/MinGW has also been mentioned, but I
don't consider that much better than Cygwin. I attempted to get it working
one time, but gave up after a few days of hacking.

Simply opening a csproj file for a class library, hacking on it, testing
under .Net and mono, and then contributing the changes seems a like a good
goal to aim for in regards to contributors. The build/packaging guys can
respond with what they are looking for on Windows.

Any thoughts/responses on making mono better on Windows is appreciated.

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