I've tried working with Mono on my Mac. Meh. You loose a big part of the eco-system of third-party libraries because almost every program I've written uses a ton of third-party libraries. When ever you google soething on C#, you'll likely be getting windows specific results.

Once you go down the pain of getting Mono to run on Linux...you may as well have just written your program in Java (or something else).

While I loved working with C#, once we moved down the path of moving off Windows platform, it's just easier to learn a new language and change your tooling.

Also, Mono's own ecosystem of additional libraries works better on Windows than on Linux. A while ago, I used a project that used an SQLite binding from the Mono project. They decided to discontinue development of this library in favour of a newer alternative, and it was then totally broken by subsequent Mono updates - but it continued to work fine on Windows with .Net. So any projects that still use this library are basically impossible to get working on Linux/Mac because Mono has awful backwards compatibility with the Mono Project's own libraries compared with .Net.

Quite funny that you try to generalize a statement from what appears to be just one single example (note: mono developer here and this is the first news I have about a fuckup like this).

It comes with the territory, I'm afraid. Some users will try something once, find a bug or limitation, decide the platform sucks and never touch it again (and if the platform is worthless, why bother filing a bug report.) I've been guilty of it myself quite a few times. First impressions count for a lot, and they can be difficult to control.

"the pain of getting Mono to run on Linux"

What's painful about 'apt-get install mono-runtime mono-mcs'? (or your distro's equivalent)

Its main target platform is/was Linux.

Getting my app to run was the hard part, not the Mono libraries itself. Even on OS X, it was pretty straightforward to get the libraries on there.

But once you started needed ASP.NET MVC, specific database drivers and setup, it become non trivial quickly, especially since stuff isn't as well documented as most other mainstream open source techs...

Edit: Also, to try and help our transition to running on Linux easier, we even integrated ServiceStack for a lot of the database drivers into the app. (Note: ServiceStack is one seriously great library if you are working in .NET-land)

Edit: Adding, that if I'm going to go through all this trouble to have a sub-set, and not-up-to-date version of the .NET framework and it's ecosystem to run as open source, I'd rather just use Java, and it's full ecosystem and be done with it.

Also, using MonoDevelop on my Mac was very uninspiring.

You forgot mono-winforms. And most users do forget it and then complain to a developer that the software does not work.

I am big C++ fan, but i understand that the C++ language is going into nowhere. It's like "all in one" solution that is too big, too hard to learn and use nowadays. I've been using C++ for more than 10 years, still many things are shocking me ))

I am sure C# is the "Next Main Desktop App Dev. Language". I really wish MS would OPEN-SOURCE it one day. You can read article in my blog about that here (really short): http://anthonyakentiev.github.io/blog/2013/12/08/what-if-see...

I wish C# will be used freely everywhere - on Apple, on Android, on Linux... Really - Mono/Xamarin does not have a full .NET/CLR/C#/frameworks support.

I disagree that C++ is going nowhere. The last few years has had more interesting stuff than most of the language's history.

First C++11 which added lots of interesting stuff. (Lambdas, move constructors, threads as part of the language spec, better smart pointers, and more.) Most of this was added in a very clever "C++ way" - for example lambdas that can be inlined as functors and can take advantage of copy constructors and RAII kind of blows my mind. Major compilers picked it up pretty quickly. Already people are talking about C++14.

I will agree that its history makes it a sort of Byzantine language (I really prefer the simplicity of C for a lot of things), but there is a lot to be optimisitic about for C++ in the last few years. With the latest standards and best practices the language it ought to have been for a long time is finally getting out.

Work with Mono and report back..