Mono for OS X and Cocoa

Question

I hear there are at least four different Cocoa bindings for Mono. The ones I know about are:

• Cocoa# (not maintained)
• Monobjc (http://www.monobjc.net/)
• NObjective bridge (http://code.google.com/p/nobjective/
• mobjc (http://code.google.com/p/mobjc/)
• MonoMac (http://mjhutchinson.com/journal/2010/06/09/monomac_in_monodevelop)

Does anyone know what the relatative merts and flaws of the different bindings?

Answer 1

You are correct that Cocoa# has not been maintained, it is just the grandfather of most of the other bindings which used some of the ideas in some form or another over the years.

The whole history behind the creation of MonoMac, the most recent set of bindings is explained in this post:

http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2010/Apr-19.html

It was a combination of:

• design decisions (rationale is available: http://monotouch.net/Documentation/API_Design)
• Licensing, we went with MIT X11 for it
• Accumulation of lessons learned from previous efforts

Answer 2

MonoMac is the latest and the most promising one. It is already time to choose MonoMac, as MonoTouch proves its advantages.