In the Linux desktop world, there's widespread sentiment that high-level
language technologies such as garbage collection, sandboxed code, and so
forth would be valuable to have and represent an improvement over C/C++.
Several desktop projects are actively interested in this kind of technology:
GNOME: many developers feel that this is the right direction Mozilla: to take
full advantage of XUL, it has to support more than just JavaScript
OpenOffice.org: has constantly flirted with Java, and is considering using
Java throughout the codebase Evolution: has considered writing new code and
features in Mono, though they are waiting for a GNOME-wide decision
Just these four projects add up to probably 90% of the lines of code in a
Linux desktop built around them.
For some time now, Novell (previously Ximian) has been hacking on the Mono
project to reimplement the .NET framewor... (more)