Comment by neonsunset

2 years ago

It is unfortunate that Ladybird did not choose C#, being another high-level-adjacent C family language with strong systems programming capabilities crucial in browser development.

It has smaller AOT binary size, faster application code performance and much bigger ecosystem of GUI libraries and native GUI library bindings (everything you have in C and C++ you pretty much have in C#) which can be used with very low overhead. Not to mention better cross-platform tools and build system.

With that said, I do like and respect Swift, and am curious to see what Ladybird team will do with it.

8 comments

neonsunset

hypeatei 2 years ago

I think most are just ignorant of what .NET is today vs 10-15 years ago. From my own personal findings, most on HN and general online dev space think it's Windows only and that hasn't been true for ~8 years or so. Microsoft has shifted to an open source approach for almost everything and Linux & Mac are first class citizens.

eterps 2 years ago
Are there any relatively well known non-Windows apps written in .NET? I guess Discord? Any others?
- neonsunset 2 years ago
  
  Pretty much every non-GUI (and GUI if it's Avalonia/Uno/etc.) .NET application, unless it uses niche things like windows registery or management API, is by definition platform agnostic and runs wherever .NET runs (macOS, Linux, FreeBSD(with caveats), Android, iOS, Windows, sometimes in browser with WASM). Most businesses which have moved away from old versions run their server workloads on Linux hosts within K8S or otherwise.
  Popular applications that run on Linux are
  Jellyfin: https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin
  Sonarr (and other High Seas apps): https://github.com/Sonarr/Sonarr
  Ryujinx: https://github.com/Ryujinx/Ryujinx (the kind of project that could likely compete with writing a browser in complexity)
  Bitwarden (server): https://github.com/bitwarden
  Garnet: https://github.com/microsoft/garnet (likely the fastest Redis implementation)
  Stride3D: https://github.com/stride3d/stride
  Godot (offers C# as script language, using regular .NET)
  Various MonoGame and FNA games (which use vanilla .NET unlike Unity, there was even a game on Nintendo Switch with private FNA fork).
  From the top of my head, I'm sure there are many others.
  
  3 replies →
- bobajeff 2 years ago
  
  Discord uses electron/React native. Where did you hear it uses .NET?
  
  1 reply →