Why .NET / Mono are no alternative cross-platform options for CodeGear

Quote from Wikipedia:

“Mono is a project led by Novell (formerly by Ximian) to create an ECMA standard compliant .NET compatible set of tools, including among others a C# compiler and a Common Language Runtime. Mono can be run on Linux, FreeBSD, UNIX, Mac OS X, Solaris and Windows operating systems.”

The problem with Mono is that .NET as a platform is under the sole control of Microsoft, and a fast-moving target. While Mono is under works since the year 2000, until today there is no stable version available that includes a full implementation of the .NET Api. What’s worse, none of the Enterprise Linux vendors ship Mono together with their Linux distributions, as it is not regarded to be used in production environments yet.

Also, Mono is primarily targeted at enabling GUI Desktop development – it’s not optimised or meant for Server applications, where the biggest and most attractive part of the Linux market is. In this market, Mono is completely insignificant and very likely will stay for a long time, if not forever.

It’s important to understand that .NET is not a cross-platform strategy – it’s targeting Windows, redundant to your existing Win32 VCL strategy.

The majority of Linux applications are written in native C code these days. The majority of cross-platform business applications also targeting Linux for deployment are written in Java.

Delphi could very well compete with both, if a native compiler for both the Windows- and the Linux-World would be available – after all, “cross-platform” even for Java usually means running the application under either Windows or Linux, which together make up more than 95% of the Server OS market share.