Maybe i'm completely uninformed but what is the real benefit of .NET. You can use the Visual Studio .NET IDE (never worked with it, but Visual Studio 6 is a pain to use). And it is easier to get alien like looking library wrappers that still need to be rubyized by hand. I don't see a real advantage here in contrast to use (and extend) the SWIG tool. And most libraries are only for windows. The mono project has a complete other goal then Microsoft when it comes to libraries. Read the announcements carefully and you will find that they use it to interact other languages more easy, but they seems not to be interested in realeasing a large and complete set of libraries. Simply because they don't have to money that SUN has and can't hire 100 programmers in Bangalore. So i would recommend to forget about .NET and put our focus directly to the libraries and the core language implementation. There is enough work to do. By the way, if you want to change the threading support you completely break the language. Can you tell me if .NET supports fibers ?