Comment by olavgg
3 months ago
As a startup, what is it in for me to switch from Java, Spring Boot, Hibernate, Beam, Flink, Pulsar, Vault, KeyCloak ecosystem to C#.Net? Is the documentation better? Do I get better performance? Is the community larger and more stable?
As others have mentioned Vault, Keycloak, Flink are language agnostic. Regarding the switch from Java to .NET, I would rather recommend switching to Kotlin instead of .NET for a developer experience similar to C#, while still keeping your existing expertise in Java and its ecosystem. And this comes from someone in a .NET shop currently, but have worked with Java before. IMHO both languages and surrounding ecosystems are good. Both have their pros and cons and quirks.
Most of that ecosystem is language agnostic, or offer much more ergonomically sane APIs in dotnet. This is especially true for anything coming out of Google (e.g. Dataflow which runs on top of Apache Beam).
C# itself has way better DX (object initializers alone are worth the switch), and most language features don't feel bolted on like with Java (anything from functional programming to extension methods to whatever).
And at least 6 years ago .net with default settings required significantly less resources (RAM, CPU) and yad significantly faster startup than comparable Java code.
C# is also significantly more consistent. You might not use LINQ, but since everything is IEnumerable, you will use the same set of methods on everything. None of the Lis.of...Collectors.collect idiocy from Java.
I also found Asp.net to have significantly less undebuggable magic than Spring.
I sometimes miss Spring magic when working with ASP.NET, and I worked 12+ years with C# and only a year with Spring. Not saying one is better than the other, it's always a choice, less magic = more boilerplate and less boilerplate = more magic.
> and most language features don't feel bolted on like with Java (anything from functional programming to extension methods to whatever)
Java doesn't have extension methods and while both are decent languages, C# is the one that likes implementing every conceivable language feature immediately, while Java takes a while to design a bigger feature that will replace several smaller ones' use cases.
> while Java takes a while to design a bigger feature that will replace several smaller ones' use cases.
Java is quite busy also implementing features that are small in other languages like text blocks.
And I wish Java would design bigger features that would replace several "smaller ones", but that is almost never the case. It's almost always just a new big feature bolted on to the language that is almost there, but not quite
There are many reasons for that, none of them simple, and it doesn't help that there's also the attitude of "those lesser languages cannot compare to the greatness that is Java" [1]
If we're talking about Java, somehow you're still required to do builder patterns and manually create `.of` constructors for everything. Where C# has had object initialisers and pervasive IEnumerable with a very simple interface that nearly everything uses. And that is only scratching the surface of DX.
Almost every feature bolted onto Java seems to take several times more code, and doesn't really work with the rest of the language.
Don't get me wrong, I quite like working with modern Java. But I had the chance to work at a company where micro services where developed in both Java and C#, and the difference is still light and day.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28985688 "our goal isn't to adopt the strategy of less successful products, but to forge our own"
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Vault, Keycloak, Flink are language agnostic or there exist bindings for most popular languages.
Documentation is vastly better compared to Java ones, it's like day and night, LINQ is vastly superior to anything that Java offered - but i haven't used java in a very long time. And every time i had to write java it felt like i went backwards in time by 5-10 years.
If i remember right Java's webserver beats ASP.NET in performance benchmarks but .net's one performance is good enough that it does not matter until you hit really big usercount - and at that point you usually have to rethink your architecture anyways.
But frankly .net is still mostly Microsoft Java but with better developer ergonomics in my opinion. It did shed a lot of overengineered OOP legacy from .net framework days though and we're seeing major performance improvements with every version.
> but i haven't used java in a very long time
What was the last Java version you used? There has been a huge momentum in adding new features lately, granted, it is slower than in C# (Java's top priority is backwards compatibility, so it does not have the luxury of shedding old stuff or changing them once they are in), but in the last couple of years it has improved tremendously. The JVM (especially in the garbage collection front) but also the language - half of an ML-style language is there (for example, ADTs and pattern matching), the other half is coming soon!
>If i remember right Java's webserver beats ASP.NET in performance benchmarks
That's not the case anymore. Kestrel is one of the fastest servers there is, and it beats every Java server out there.
the famous benchmark that put ASP.NET in #1 spot was hyperoptimzied to hell while competing with normal implementations of other systems. https://web.archive.org/web/20250330225652/https://dusted.co...
archived version becasue original one gives 404
currently according to techempower benchmarks ASP.net is 55th overall in minimal variant, while being 83 in normal one in Fortunes benchmark which is basically a normal usecase.
While most java framworks oscillate between 10-30
https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r23
EDIT: there's also an entry for aspnetcore at 35th
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I do not have any benchmarks other than this[1] to refer to, but I work with Quarkus[2] and Java 25 LTS (just recently released) services deployed on AWS EKS and we are very happy with the performance (for mobile game backends)
[1]: https://sharkbench.dev/web [2]: https://quarkus.io/
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That's not what Microsoft's own sponsored benchmarks say:
https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r23
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> Documentation is vastly better compared to Java ones, it's like day and night
This is absolutely not my experience, especially when it comes to the ecosystem and third-party libraries. Like Java is pretty much the best in this category.
well you can't judge 3rd party libraries, can you? by that metric js/ts would be the worst thing in existence.
I've seen some great, some horrible 3rd party docs on .net side - same with java.
Yes.