I should also mention that statical linking tends to make multi-threaded application's performance suffer. My previous project wasn't multi-threaded, but Font Validator - at least the GUI - is. We'll see how that might be the case if/when it is done.

Did a bit of experiment on both linux and mac os x. mkbundle has bit-rotted slightly since I last looked at it so it is another bug to file with the mono folks (soon); but it seems do-able, the only issue being that the stand-alone binary can't find the xsl style sheet (again this is a well-known issue - stand-alone binary have no knowledge of location of auxilliary files - it can be worked-around by having the file in memory as a byte array).

Native executables were released from Jan 2016 onwards, and user experience is on the whole positive; the process of making them is a bit tedious and somewhat labour-intensive and not yet scriptable, but is documented step-by-step privately. At some stage I'll put the instruction out.

Just another note; there is an incentive to migrate towards sysdrawing-coregraphics (
http://github.com/mono/sysdrawing-coregraphics ) - it would likely go around the fontconfig cache rebuild issue, and possibly faster also.

Would be nice to get the Cocoa webkit bridge working:
microsoft#29

and migrates to https://github.com/HinTak/sysdrawing-coregraphics and https://github.com/HinTak/MonoMac.Windows.Form to solve the fontconfig problem and get a more native look and feel.