The Mono Project has long operated with a primary design goal of maintaining accurate and precise code compatibility with the .NET platform. As Mono’s founder, Miguel de Icaza says, “…we have always believed it is better to be slow and correct than to be fast and wrong.” The result is that the project has previously focused on conformant code first rather than proactively addressing performance concerns. (This is not to say that performance was ignored, as Mono has produced 4 code generator variants and an LLVM backend, among other projects.)
Now de Icaza has announced that Mark Probst is leading a team at Mono that will focus specifically on improving project performance without waiting for users to report problems. Beyond the immediate focus on these improvements, this should also allow the team to make design decisions that make sense on a long-term basis rather than short-sighted quick fixes.
The team is initially working to improve the instrumentation of Mono so that current behavior can be accurately measured but has also already begun contributing optimizations to the Mono platform. These changes are wide ranging, and as de Icaza notes this has lead to the creation of a new stack which includes performance counters so that runtime activity can be monitored. Additionally the “… runtime and user-defined performance counters…” have been unified so a new profiler UI will be available soon.