Xamarin vs. Mono vs. Monodevelop

user1751117 picture user1751117 · May 11, 2014 · Viewed 30.6k times · Source

What is the relationship between Xamarin and Mono(Are they the same product)?

Is the Monodevelop IDE related to Mono?

Answer

Anthony Gatlin picture Anthony Gatlin · May 11, 2014

Xamarin is primarily a platform for developing mobile applications (Android and iPhone) using C#.

The Mono project is an open-source port of the .NET framework. It is most commonly used to run .NET under Linux. From a performance standpoint, it runs about 50% (on average) as fast as the .NET framework.

MonoDevelop is an open-source C# IDE analagous to Eclipse or Visual Studio.

Miguel de Icaza was the primary developer for Mono and is one of the founders/owners of Xamarin.