Miguel de Icaza speaks

What do you do as a hobby? Any side programming, or strange languages that you like playing with?
I like talking to my friends, a lot. Programming is moving so fast that it is difficult to keep up with all the innovation coming out left and right from this globally connected world. It is fascinating to just watch as innovation becomes more and more decentralised and fun hacks emerge around the clock in every possible language and in every possible field. As someone that works on building platforms, I love to see what people create and build. Sometimes I wish I spent more time building end-user applications.

If you could redesign any major system, like printing, GUI or, say, a network protocol, what would it be?
Like everyone else, I have a series of pet peeves about the software that I use, the protocols and the standards. And although I would not mind seeing a new stack develop that would completely replace a given component, I am not sure that even with the resources it would translate into something that would change people’s lives and hence amount to something innovative.
I’d rather work with the components that we have, fix what we can, and build on the years of existing software and deployed systems to build new applications.

That being said, if I had to pick, ever since I had a talk with Christopher Oliver from Sun earlier this year, I believe that we are missing an opportunity by not embracing 3D game engines as the foundation for all of our computing needs.
Today desktop APIs are mostly 2D APIs, with various degrees of primitive animation support and rendering.

Game engines, on the other hand, have solved some very complicated problems: optimising the rendering of millions of objects at the same time; animating objects; playing transitions; high-level animations for individual components; physics and particles support.

I would like to see traditional applications built on top of engines like that, in a similar spirit to what Unity did when they ported their Unity product to Windows. They rewrote the Unity IDE in terms of Unity itself.

What’s the coolest new technology in Linux?
Too many things to list. I am of course passionate about Mono and Moonlight and the ecosystems around those, but innovation is flourishing left and right and people for the first time in history are working across national borders and time zones to invent the future. We are living in a different world, and my only regret is that I won’t live a thousand years to see what ends up happening.

What’s next for Mono?
It is a huge space. But just speaking about the runtime and the CLI would keep me talking for days. We are going to continue to explore bringing Mono to new platforms like we just did with the iPhone. We are also interested in bringing technologies like Moonlight to new and interesting platforms like the PlayStation and the Wii on top of our existing ports.

But if you look at the ECMA CLI space, I think that we have only begun to scratch the surface of what is possible with a universal high-level representation of code. Just like we did with the SIMD extensions last year, we are looking at how we can reuse the ECMA CLI for parallel computing, GPU-based programming and cluster computing. It is a fascinating space.