We needed a portable cross-platform, architecture compiler system that would allow us to develop code on one OS or architecture and deploy it on another with out recompiling. The problem with using gcc was that for every target OS or architecture we would need a separate cross compiler. Additionally maintaining and developing this toolset would be a large task.
Initially Python was selected as our cross platform language. Python was great but we were always concerned with its speed, especially in real-time applications.
We discovered Mono while we were evaluating 3D engines. Mono was successfully being used to develop video games and it was extremely fast. We performed a small test and compared the speed between Python and C# mono and
were shocked at how fast mono was compared to python.
In addition to the speed increase and portability, we now had the ability to allow our users to write scripts in any .Net language.
Switching to Mono has given us the ability to write very fast cross platform applications and has provided us with a multi-language scripting interface, and the intergration of Mono within our application suite has proved to be a huge success.
