Using Microsoft's Assemblies in Mono Runtime

Question

I would like to test my app under the Mono runtime (to see if the SIMD support can offer me any performance improvements). I am compiling my app with csc.exe (in Visual Studio 2005) and then running it as mono.exe --debug MyApp.exe. However, Mono is using their own implementation of the core libraries (System.IO, etc.) which have some stuff not implemented.

Is it possible to tell the Mono runtime to use the core libraries shipped by Microsoft, rather than their own?

^{(Yes, I do realize that this would mean I'd have to distribute both MS .NET 2.0 and Mono with my app. If SIMD support is helpful for me, I'll eliminate these dependencies and use Mono's implementation. For now, I just want to test out the SIMD stuff without having to make a whole lot of other changes.)}

Answer 1

You could put Microsoft's assemblies in your app's bin folder, and I think they would be picked up and used. If nothing else, you can put Microsoft's assemblies in Mono's GAC so it would have no choice but to use them.

Having said that, I highly doubt Microsoft's assemblies will work due to coupling between the assemblies and the runtime. (That is, the assemblies probably make private calls into the runtime that are different than Mono's runtime.)