Comment by mynameisash
20 hours ago
C# used to be my favorite language, but having spent a lot of time in Rust using its algebraic data types + match statements + Option & Result types, then returning to C# to build a few moderately involved libraries, I'm horrified by the enums and null & error handling that I used to deal with all the time.
I knew that enums were really just named integer values and nothing more, but I had forgotten than you can build a perfectly legal enum from an integer out of the bounds of the enum's range. And a switch statement is non-exhaustive. (As I said, it had been a while since I used C# extensively.) What would have been a few lines of code in Rust turned into dozens to try to exhaustively protect against invalid input.
I know C# is a mature language that has been around for decades, but how janky everything feels comparatively really shocked me. I only very briefly played with F# about a decade ago, but my guess is that I could try to pick that up and call F# from C#, getting much better ergonomics with a combination of the two.
> I had forgotten than you can build a perfectly legal enum from an integer out of the bounds of the enum's range. And a switch statement is non-exhaustive
These are solved by the new feature described in the article that we're commenting on right now. They're giving us unions and exhaustive switch. Ctrl+F "canonical way to work with unions" in the article to see an example. One of the best parts about C# is they never stop bringing useful features from other languages back home to us in C#. It makes for a large language with a lot of features, but if we really want something, we'll eventually get it in C#.
And one of the worst is how long it takes them to implement even simple things. There are parts of the language (Expression) that are 20 years behind the rest and they don’t see the problem.
Learning Rust really ruined C# for me. The explicitness saves you from so much defensive programming.
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