Comment by russellbeattie
9 months ago
So, does everything he said about C# sound about right? I have no real desire to use it, but I'm curious if his opinion was more or less accurate.
Not looking for a flame war, just knowledge
9 months ago
So, does everything he said about C# sound about right? I have no real desire to use it, but I'm curious if his opinion was more or less accurate.
Not looking for a flame war, just knowledge
Yes, C# has had low-level primitives since 1.0 and it has only gotten better in this regard. This means that it's worse than Java at things like devirtualizing calls, but you can write allocation-free hot loops in C# these days.
It's also cross-platform and has multiple deployment modes: you can ship the runtime and the program separately (good when you control the end-user machines, like in an enterprise settings), you can tree-shake the runtime and ship it with the program, or you can tree-shake the runtime and use the AOT compiler to ship a go-like native binary.
The JIT compiler is still better for long-running processes like servers, but for one-shot programs where the startup time is critical, like CLI tools and FaaS, the AOT compiler is really great.
> you can tree-shake the runtime and use the AOT compiler to ship a go-like native binary.
The OP talks about doing this for mobile platforms, but could I take e.g. the OP's source code (he co-wrote Celeste) and trivially compile an AOT native binary for x86_64, or would more work be required to make that possible?
(Interestingly, Celeste on Linux doesn't use the dotnet runtime, but instead a portable Mono runtime which I believe is based on MonoKickstart. [1])
[1] https://github.com/flibitijibibo/MonoKickstart