I just came across Miguel de Icaza’s post about recent Mono performance enhancements.  I’m very happy to see all of the innovation in the C# language by Microsoft (see C# 4.0), but the .NET runtime isn’t getting any faster, unless you’re a dynamic language guy.

However, the Mono runtime is getting faster.  They’ve got static compilation, a brand new JIT compiler, and a framework extension so you can easily take advantage of the SIMD (vector) operations that have been available on Intel CPUs for a decade.

A simple way to think about it is that, for instance, you could use the Vector4f class (4 floats) and perform a floating-point vector operation four times faster.  I can’t wait to work with the new Mono.