What are your thoughts about them?
Sometimes I have to write unmanaged code at work, but with large scale (games) projects, it just becomes way more time-consuming and complicated, which is solved by throwing more people at it.
Do you think managed code is viable for large scale applications? (applications like Photoshop, 3ds Max, Maya, XSI, etc, which are computationally intensive but don't have the realtime requirements of games (to a degree).
I think using unmanaged code for performance reasons is one of the worst premature optimizations I´ve ever heard of. Before you choose some technology that is harder to work with just because it might faster you should be very sure that you need the speed.
Besides the CLR is so close to unmanged performance that 99 out of 100 cases shouldnt even have to think about it. And even if you fall into the camp that needs the performance you should write most of your code in the managed space and then switch to unmanged in the parts that your profiler tells you to.
About games in particular: there have been a few bigger titles writen in on mono now that gained performance, because they could write everything in manged code and didnt have to resort to scripting languages for the abstract parts like AI.
Hi! I think you can do large applications with .NET. There are many examples out there:
One word about computationally intensive applications: Since the code is compiled to machine code by the interpreter, most calculations should be as fast as unmanaged code.
On the other hand you have a lot of advantages:
