Mono 3.6 has been released, focusing on several areas for improvement. Areas affected include garbage collection, class libraries, performance, and bug fixes. Regardless of their focus, all Mono developers should find new functionality to take advantage of.
A forthcoming profiler from Xamarin will be able to take advantage of performance counters added to 3.6’s profiler. Nuget is now distributed for Mac users. Also benefitting developers debugging via a USB cable (smartphone and tablet targeted projects, for example) is a buffered response mode.
Various bug fixes and memory leaks have been corrected in the http stack, and these fixes have been joined by a new test harness to prevent regression errors. Performance changes mean fine locking is used over a single hard lock, and internal changes to the runtime to assist generics. Notably the Mono team’s version of msbuild can now build the Roslyn project.
While the code marked 3.6 has been formally released and is available through GitHub, this release is not evenly distributed to the 3 major platforms Mono supports (Linux, Windows, and Max OS X). Users of a Debian-based Linux can obtain packages from the Mono Project by adding a repository. Other distributions are directed to their respective package maintainers. The most current release available Windows users is only 3.2.3. Users of Mac OS X will find the easiest path, as current versions of Mono are available for immediate installation off of the project’s website.