Wes Maldonado: Data Junkie

Silverlight Security

The Silverlight security system (described here, here and here in Shawn Farkas’ blog) promises to be very useful.

Unlike CAS that was hard to understand, the Silverlight security model is very simple and can be explained in a couple of minutes. This should be useful very useful to folks running untrusted code like SecondLife.

Interesting mention of Silverlight referencing SecondLife from Miguel de Icaza: Rodrigo, Mark and Marek Join Novell’s Mono Team

Most people probably will not run into a situation where boxing and unboxing are going to really matter in their applications, others do. Read this post to see how a module’s heap usage went from 103MB to 16MB.

Take the TagLib.ByteVector class. It serializes many formats of data into a collection of bytes. However, it was using the System.Collections.ArrayList class to store these bytes! As a byte type is stack-based data, and ArrayList stores heap-based data, each stack-based member of the collection must be boxed for storage and unboxed for retrieval.

Simply by replacing ArrayList with List, the excessive memory problem goes away, since the type to be stored in the collection is known at compile time, and thus boxing/unboxing is no longer necessary.

http://abock.org/2006/10/30/cracking-down-on-heap-abuse-part-1/

Today the scripts running on Second Life are a bit slow, so they are looking at Mono and the CLI as a way of providing more speed to their users and hopefully allow developers to write in other languages other than their Linden Labs Scripting Language.

They have a compiler that translates their scripting language into CIL bytecodes, and the preliminary results give a performance increase between 50 and 150 faster execution with Mono.

http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2006/Aug-03.html

Yes, people actually do use Mono in “the real world”.