Science Quote by Miguel de Icaza

The blandness is the point. Miguel de Icaza’s line reads like release-notes prose, but it’s quietly doing persuasion work: it frames Mono not as a risky reimplementation of Microsoft’s .NET ecosystem, but as a platform with momentum, generosity, and legitimacy. “In addition to that” signals an ongoing list of accomplishments, the rhetorical equivalent of a developer scrolling past bullet points and realizing the project is bigger than they assumed. The key phrase is “a very large set” - not “some,” not “useful,” but large, implying breadth, seriousness, and a kind of inevitability: if there are this many libraries, the ecosystem must be real.

Subtext: this isn’t just about technical completeness; it’s about trust. Mono lived in the uneasy space between open-source ideals and corporate gravity, and libraries are the currency of adoption. APIs and tooling decide whether programmers feel at home. By emphasizing “extra libraries,” de Icaza is selling a promise that Mono is not merely compatible, it’s additive. It suggests a community (or at least a team) investing beyond the minimum needed to chase parity.

Context matters: Mono was a bid to make .NET viable on Linux and other platforms during an era when “embrace, extend” anxieties weren’t paranoid, just historically informed. This sentence tries to disarm that suspicion with abundance. It’s the pragmatic scientist’s argument: don’t debate motives; look at the surface area. A “very large set” is a foothold in culture as much as code.