Comment by reactordev
4 days ago
I agree. The stability comes from its ecosystem though. Enterprise Software. Where things like meticulous use of Omit and Task are common place and really REALLY bad things happen if you fuck up.
But besides that, there’s a healthy gamedev community that embraced C# early and have been using it ever since. There’s C++ MFC guys that got duped into WPF and have been supporting it ever since. Winforms devs that are still trying to make a dark mode. I’ve even seen community grass roots “I need this in Silverlight” projects take hold and become one of the largest SDKs in the world. It’s cool. It’s fun. And with AOT, it’s everywhere. C# is like that cool uncle of your Father (Java) that likes to party all night but still holds a job. Maybe someday TS.Net will exist and we’ll all be singing “Back in my day”
I very much doubt about TS.Net, given the rewrite in Go decision.
.NET nowadays has a serious adoption problem, and they should spend more time talking with their own colleagues at Azure, about their use of Java, Go, Rust.
> .NET nowadays has a serious adoption problem
It's seriously going to make people question the future of the platform. Look at Microsoft's actions, not their words.
TS Compiler: Go New TUI Editor: Rust Winget: C++ (this would have been a great candidate for .NET)
At least PowerToys is C#.
.NET is great, but why isn't it good enough for Microsoft? The company that historically has had such a strong culture of dogfooding.
The issue was in the beginning they didn’t think interop with C/C++ was value add. People complained and they added “Managed C++” which unfortunately influenced C++03’s design a lot. It wasn’t until C++11 that Microsoft gave up. You couldn’t effectively interop with C++ without writing a managed C++ wrapper, which only worked on windows. They added support for P/Invoke to aid in Win32 calls (shell.dll, user32.dll) as a simple fix and we went nuts for it. Wrote wrappers using P/Invoke and a config map nightmare of which dll’s, or dylib’s, or so’s, you needed to get the form to show.
Fast forward to today… Rust can interop with C natively. Go can as well, though you’re bringing your luggage with you with CGO. .Net hasn’t ever really had that kind of focus. For one, IL, two, Microsoft saw the platform as a cash cow, three, ecosystem lock in allowed a thriving “MVP” contractor community.
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Windows and Office never adopted .NET for client code in the first place except for the Longhorn period in the mid-00s, which burned them and put them off it. If that didn't stop .NET in the two decades between then and now, I'm not sure why it would today. Actually, Windows is just now starting to adopt C# now that AOT is supported (I think the new native Copilot app is C#).
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Anders Hejlsberg, a main architect on C# & TS, stated somewhere that they re-wrote the TS Compiler in Go because the syntax was the closest to how it was originally written and allowed re-writing to be easiest. He has a great write up of it somewhere on GitHub.
Microsoft is an insanely huge company. There teams seem to be able to use whatever works best for the project/team.
The old XKCD comic of org charts in big tech shows Microsoft as a bunch of people aiming guns at each other for a reason. They'll have 5 teams making 5 competing products sometimes. That's the culture I'm aware of. I'm not aware of the dogfooding culture you are suggesting.
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Not sure I agree on the adoption problem. A few medium sized client projects are nothing compared to the massive internal .NET codebases Microsoft has that run some of their largest services.
.NET team members have acknowledged this on podcast interviews, .NET Rocks, Nick Chapsas, The Unhadled Exception, among possibly others.
I would not touch C# unless you are already using it. Microsoft proves over and over it cannot be trusted in what they say. Watch what they do:
- basically dont use ant UI framework they say is the future and they are not using themselves - be vary of the future of some of it stuff like C#
C# has been around a long enough time and Microsoft's teams over that time have done a pretty good job making upgrading each version easy.
As long as the current leadership in the C# & .NET teams remain, it's a very safe language and framework to use. They also deserve huge kudos to API & performance improvements the past decade since moving on from .NET Framework 4.x, which still runs fine.
They also have a lot of internal & external users using it.
Oh I learned this the hard way. Managed DirectX, XNA, Creators Club, Windows Store, shared profit motive, fair business practices, Project Natal/Kinect, Azure, and finally… .Net. Yup, Microsoft loves developers… loves their subscriptions.
I know, so sad, could have been a great opportunity.
Just like every CNCF project that Azure contributes to, written in Go or Rust, which could have been great carrots to further .NET's adoption.
I blame historic microsoft for their anti-oss stance. It kneecapped the .net ecosystem for over a decade and created an attitude of "if it isn't in .NET, I won't use it".
That has certainly played a role, however that is common to Windows development culture in general.
The 3x "Developers !" meme isn't for nothing, Microsoft just like Apple (and NeXT), always a full stack development experience story.
Everything that one needs is there on the full Visual Studio Professional, and then there was the ecosystem of small indie developers and MS Partners building on top of that.
That is quite different from UNIX FOSS culture, and has also been a friction point to those that went Apple without understanding that also have that on their DNA, regardless of OS X foundations.
I agree as well. The hostile attitude towards OSS under Ballmer led to this. Nadella had the correct approach and a year later, started repairing those bridges, joining the Linux Foundation.
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What's Omit refer to in this context?
The 14,000~ instances of T? or _