Mono 2.6 Released, Supports LLVM Generation

To end out 2009, Miguel de Icaza has announced the release of Mono 2.6 along with MonoDevelop 2.4. This major update to Mono delivers WCF client and server for what is exposed by Microsoft's Silverlight 2.0, a continuations framework, a new soft debugger, a verifier and security toolbox, more complete 3.5 coverage, and various other changes to this free software project to implement Microsoft's .NET on Linux. One of the interesting changes though in Mono 2.6 is that it now supports LLVM.

Mono is using the Low-Level Virtual Machine compiler/optimizer framework for code generation in addition to Mono's built-in JIT compiler. Mono now is able to take advantage of all the optimization work that goes into LLVM, which leads to faster performance but takes greater time and memory than their integrated JIT compiler. Information on Mono's usage of LLVM can be found at Mono-Project.com. LLVM is already being used within the Gallium3D driver framework for optimizing graphics shaders and is also being used by a variety of other software projects for various creative purposes.

Details on Mono 2.6 and MonoDevelop 2.2 can be found in Miguel's blog post.