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Miguel de Icaza of the Mono project made two surprise announcements in a recent blog post : "We are working to improve our support for F# and together with various groups at Microsoft we are working to improve Mono's compatibility with the CLR to run IronPython, IronRuby and F# flawlessly in Mono. Supporting F# will require some upgrades to the way that Mono works to effectively support tail call optimizations." "we continue to work on integrating LLVM [better use LLVM to produce better code, use it in more places where the old JIT was still required and expand its use to be used for AOT code]" We have been pushing for these developments (F# support and an LLVM backend) for over a year now and it is very exciting to hear that the Mono team are taking this seriously. F# is the future of .NET and building upon LLVM offers huge potential not only for improving upon the performance of Mono's code generator but also in improving LLVM itself, which is now the ...

Tail call elimination is an essential feature for functional programming languages. This feature simply refers to the ability for one function to end with a function call without leaking stack space. Tail call elimination can be essential in heavily functional code such as parser combinators and libraries written in continuation passing style. Lack of tail calls on the defacto-standard JVM has raised concerns around languages like Scala and Clojure. Fortunately, work is underway to address this issue by implementing tail call elimination on MLVM/OpenJDK. Microsoft's .NET has had tail call elimination for eight years and the Mono project is designed to replicate the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) that is responsible for this feature. The Mono team have been advertising tail call elimination on their VM for many years. However, when we tested the elimination of tail calls on several VMs we discovered that tail calls are seriously broken on Mono but work on other VMs including ...

Microsoft's Common Language Run-time (CLR) was a fantastic idea. The ability to interoperate safely and at a high-level between different languages, from managed C++ to F#, has greatly accelerated development on the Microsoft platform. The resulting libraries, like Windows Presentation Foundation, are already a generation ahead of anything available on any other platform. Linux and Mac OS X do not currently have the luxury of a solid foundation like the CLR. Consequently, they are composed entirely from uninteroperable components written in independent languages, from unmanaged custom C++ dialects to Objective C and Python. Some developers choose to restrict themselves to the lowest common denominator (e.g. writing GTK in C) which aids interoperability but only at a grave cost in productivity. Other developers gravitate to huge libraries written in custom dialects of particularly uninteroperable languages (e.g. Qt). Both approaches have a bleak future. The situation is compounded b...