Miguel de Icaza, Mono’s founder, recently announced the creation of the XobotOS research project. XobotOS is the Android operating system with all Java code removed and C# code put in its place. Miguel offers two compelling reasons behind this research project:
Over and over we came back to the basics: Dalvik is a young virtual machine, it is not as performant or tuned as Mono and suffers from many of Java’s performance limitations without the benefit of the high-end optimizations from Oracle’s HotSpot. One crazy idea that the team had at that dinner was to translate Android’s source code to C#. Android would benefit from C# performance features like structures, P/Invoke, real generics and our more mature runtime.
