Why are there four mono C# compilers?

Question

This page explains about the four different mono compilers - mcs/gmcs/smcs/dmcs.

To me, it\'s a little bit weird to have four C# compilers. As normally the newer versio

Answer 1

It's because Mono's compiler is written in C# and uses System.Reflection, which means it can only access mscorlib from the runtime that it's running on. Therefore, for example, smcs doesn't just target 2.1, it actually uses 2.1 corlib, etc.

There have been plan for a while to have *mcs use either Mono.Cecil or Ikvm.Reflection instead of System.Reflection, which would mean there could then be a single mcs compiler with arguments to target different runtimes.

Microsoft's compiler doesn't have this limitation because it doesn't use .NET Reflection (it's written in native code).