Download Mono 2.4

The developers of Mono have Monday version 2.4 released. Mono is an open source implementation of the .Net Framework. By using Mono, developers can write cross-platform applications that will work not only on Windows, but also on Mac OS X and Linux, for example. The software includes a C# compiler, a .Net compatible runtime and two sets of APIs. The former provides compatibility with Microsoft’s .Net Framework including support for asp.net, ado.net, and a number of other components, and the other provides a variety of Linux and Unix-specific features. The main changes since version 2.2 are summarized below:

Major Highlights

• SIMD support in Mono
  SIMD constructors are now optimized. A few APIs have been renamed to better suit the Design Guidelines.
• No more polling
  One of the most challenging components of Mono was supporting Thread.Interrupt in a way that worked across multiple operating systems. In previous versions of Mono, the only solution we found that was portable was to poll every 100ms for potential interruptions requested by another thread.
  Starting with Mono 2.4, that polling code is no longer present and instead a cross-platform solution to the problem is being used that provides both support for Thread.Interrupt() and does not consume CPU cycles.

Other Changes

• The old JIT has been removed, and only the new linear IR based JIT is available.
• The –enable-parallel-mark=yes argument to configure is now the default, this speeds up garbage collections on multi-core machines.
• WaitHandle now supports SignalAndWait.
• MarshalByRefObject supports MemberwiseClone
• COM: support NULLs IDispatch and IUnknown.

Behavioral Changes

• Our System.Diagnostics.Process implementation will now properly raise the termination event on OutputDataReceived and ErrorDataReceived. See bug 459450 (for details.