The Mono runtime implements the ECMA Common Language Infrastructure (CLI). The Mono runtime implements this virtual machine.
If you are interested in the technical aspects of the Mono runtime check the Runtime Documentation.
If you are interested in the technical aspects of the Mono runtime check the Runtime Documentation.
- Mono Runtime For Mac Os
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- Mono For Mac Os
- Download Mono Runtime For Mac
- Mono Runtime Mac
Mono runs on Mac, this page describes the various features available for users who want to use Mono or Mono-based technologies on macOS. Installing Mono on macOS is very simple: Download the latest Mono release for Mac; Run the.pkg file and accept the terms of the license. Mono is now installing.
- Obtaining the correct keys and certificates can be difficult to get right the first time. So see the Xamarin.Mac signing documentation. Hardened Runtime – This is a second layer of security introduced in macOS Mojave (10.14). By code signing with an additional flag the Cocoa runtime will apply a number of restrictions upon the application.
- The 'Visual Studio is currently running on Mono 5.2.0.104' message tells you what the Visual Studio for Mac is running on. It does not indicate what your project will be run with.
- The Mono runtime can be used as a stand-alone process, or it can be embedded into applications. Embedding the Mono runtime allows applications to be extended in C# while reusing all of the existing C and C code. For more details, see the Embedding Mono page and the Scripting With Mono page. Supported Platforms.
The runtime offers the following services:
- Code Execution
- Code loading
- Support for dynamically generating code
- Garbage Collection, using one of:
- Conservative Boehm Garbage Collector
- Code Generation
- Just-in-Time compilation, partial and full Ahead-of-Time modes
- Backend engines:
- Mono’s own engine
- Exception Handling
- Software-triggered exceptions
- Hardware-triggered exceptions like Floating point exceptions, null reference exceptions
- Operating system interface
- File system IO
- Networking IO
- Access to operating system properties and features
- On Unix systems, Mono.Posix APIs
- Program isolation using Application Domains (AppDomain)
- Thread management:
- Threadpool for user code
- Threadpool for networked IO
- Asynchronous method invocation
- Console access
- Security System
The Mono runtime can be used as a stand-alone process, or it can be embedded into applications
Embedding the Mono runtime allows applications to be extended in C# while reusing all of the existing C and C++ code. For more details, see the Embedding Mono page and the Scripting With Mono page.
Supported Platforms
Mono has support for both 32 and 64 bit systems on a number of architectures as well as a number of operating systems.
Mono Runtime For Mac Os
Supported Operating Systems
Operating Systems
![Use shared mono runtime Use shared mono runtime](/uploads/1/1/9/7/119723214/882214694.png)
- Apple iOS, iOS
- Apple macOS,
- BSD - OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD
Supported Architectures
Supported Architectures | Operating system |
---|---|
s390, s390x (32 and 64 bits) | Linux |
SPARC (32) | Solaris, Linux |
PowerPC | Linux, macOS, Wii, PlayStation 3 |
x86 | Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Microsoft Windows, Solaris, macOS, Android |
x86-64: AMD64 and EM64T (64 bit) | Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, macOS |
IA64 Itanium2 (64 bit) | Linux |
ARM: little and big endian | Linux (both old and new ABI), iPhone, Android |
Alpha | not maintained. Linux |
MIPS | Linux |
HPPA | not maintained Linux |
Note that the Alpha, MIPS, ARM big-endian and HPPA architectures are community-supported and may not be as complete as the other architectures.
Support for SPARC64 works in older versions of Mono, but not in the recent versions.
Packages for most platforms are available from the Downloads page.
Embedded systems
To make mono more suitable for some architectures used as embedded systems have a look at the Small footprint page.
Compilation Engine
Paolo Molaro did a presentation on the current JIT engine and the new JIT engine. You can find his slides here.
We have re-written our JIT compiler. We wanted to support a number of features that were missing: Ahead of Time compilation, simplify porting and have a solid foundation for compiler optimizations.
Ahead-of-time compilation
The idea is to allow developers to pre-compile their code to native code to reduce startup time, and the working set that is used at runtime in the just-in-time compiler.
Although in Mono this has not been a visible problem, we wanted to pro-actively address this problem.
When an assembly (a Mono/.NET executable) is installed in the system, then it is possible to pre-compile the code, and have the JIT compiler tune the generated code to the particular CPU on which the software is installed.
This is done in the Microsoft.NET world with a tool called ngen.exe.
The code produced by Mono’s ahead-of-time compiler is Position Independent Code (PIC) which tends to be a bit slower than regular JITed code, but what you loose in performance with PIC you gain by being able to use all the available optimizations.
To compile your assemblies with this, just run this command:
The above command will turn on all optimizations (
-O=all
) and then instructs Mono to compile the code to native code.Mono Download Mac
Additionally, if you want to do full static builds (and be able to run without the JIT engine), you can use:
Then you can configure your Mono runtime with –enable-minimal to remove the JIT engine. This is useful on systems that do not support Just-in-Time compilation at the kernel level.
Some features like Reflection.Emit and other forms of dynamic code generation are not support in this scenario.
Notice that for Mono 2.0 generics are not supported when doing full-AOT.
Some optimizations are being planned: OptimizingAOT
Mono For Mac Os
Bundles
Mono also offers bundles. Bundles merge your application, the libraries it uses and the Mono runtime into a single executable image. You can think of bundles as “statically linking mono” into your application.
To do this, you use the “mkbundle” command (see the man page distributed with Mono for more details).
For example, to create a fully static and bundled version of Mono for “hello world”, you would:
Of course, you can also just embed the libraries, without the actual Mono runtime, by removing the –static flag.
Linker
Mono ships with a customizable assembly-linker. This is a technology that can be used tocreate a custom deployment of the Mono runtime that only contains the code that your applicationuses. This is similar to what a native linker does, except that we retain the same assemblies.
For example:
You can combine the output of the linker with the bundler. Allowing you to producesmaller versions of your self-contained executables.
Platform for Code Optimizations
Beyond the use of the Mono VM as Just-in-Time compiler, we need to make Mono code generation as efficient as possible.
The design called for a good architecture that would enable various levels of optimizations: some optimizations are better performed on high-level intermediate representations, some on medium-level and some at low-level representations.
Also it should be possible to conditionally turn these on or off. Some optimizations are too expensive to be used in just-in-time compilation scenarios, but these expensive optimizations can be turned on for ahead-of-time compilations or when using profile-guided optimizations on a subset of the executed methods.
Simplify Porting
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We wanted to reduce the effort required to port the Mono code generator to new architectures.
For Mono to gain wide adoption in the UNIX world, it is necessary that the JIT engine works in most of today’s commercial hardware platforms.
The new Mono engine now supports both 32 and 64 bit systems and various architectures (See Supported Platforms).
Profiling and Code Coverage
Mono provides a number of profiling tools and code coverage tools.
See the Performance Tips page for details on using the profiler, and the Code Coverage page for information on how to use the code coverage functionality with your application and your test suites.
DTrace
Mono’s support for DTrace is available on Solaris and macOS.
Logging runtime events
See Logging runtime events.
Versioning
Mono supports a Global Assembly Cache or GAC. The GAC is used to share libraries between different applications, to keep multiple versions of the same library installed at once and to avoid conflicts over the names of the libraries and they also play an important role in trust and security.
See the Assemblies_and_the_GAC document for more details.
Garbage Collection
Mono today uses Boehm’s GC as its Garbage Collection engine. We are also working on a precise and compacting GC engine specific to Mono.
The GC interface is being isolated to allow for more than one GC engine to be used or for the GC to be tuned for specific tasks.
Mono’s use of Boehm GC
We are using the Boehm conservative GC in precise mode.
There are a few areas that the GC scans for pointers to managed objects:
- The heap (where other managed objects are allocated)
- thread stacks and registers
- static data area
- data structures allocated by the runtime
(1) is currently handled in mostly precise mode: almost always the GC will only consider memory words that contain only references to the heap, so there is very little chance of pointer misidentification and hence memory retention as a result. The new GC requires a fully precise mode here, so it will improve things marginally. The details about mostly precise have to do with large objects with sparse bitmaps of references and the handling of multiple appdomains safely.
(2) is always scanned conservatively. This will be true for the new GC, too, at least for the first versions, where I’ll have my own share of fun at tracking the bugs that a moving generational GC will expose. Later we’ll conservatively scan only the unmanaged part of the stacks.
(3) We already optimized this both with Boehm and the current GC to work in precise mode.
(4) I already optimized this to work in mostly precise mode (ie some data structures are dealt with precisely, others not yet). I’ll need to do more work in this area, especially for the new GC, where having pinned objects can be a significant source of pain.
References
- Garbage collection list and FAQ: http://www.iecc.com/gclist/
- “A Generational Mostly-concurrent Garbage Collector”:
- Details on The Microsoft .NET Garbage Collection Implementation:
IO and threading
The ECMA runtime and the .NET runtime assume an IO model and a threading model that is very similar to the Win32 API.
Dick Porter has developed WAPI: the Mono abstraction layer that allows our runtime to execute code that depend on this behaviour, this is called the `io-layer’ in the Mono source code distribution.
This io-layer offers services like named mutexes that can be shared across multiple processes.
To achieve this, the io-layer uses a shared file mapping across multiple Mono processes to track the state that must be shared across Mono applications in the ~/.wapi directory.
Useful links
See our Papers section for various articles describing virtual machines and JIT compilers.
Mono Runtime Mac
Porting
See the Porting page for more details on porting Mono to a new platform.
Projects Under Development
There are a number of projects being developed in branches or on separate trees for the runtime, these are:
- Runtime Projects: General Runtime Projects.
- Runtime Requests: Ideas of things that we could use to improve Mono’s runtime.
- Compacting GC: A generational, compacting GC for Mono.
- JIT Regalloc: A new register allocation framework.
- Mono_Runtime_API_Changes: Changes that will be introduced in Mono 2.8.
Completed projects:
- Continuations: Support for co-routines and continuations in Mono.
- SafeHandles: Support for 2.0 SafeHandles.
- Linear: An update to the JIT’s internal representation (IR).
COM and XPCOM
Mono’s COM support can be used to interop with system COM components in Windows and in Linux (if you use a COM implementation). Additionally, Mono’s COM support can be used to access software based on Mozilla’s XPCOM.
For details on the progress, see the COM Interop page.