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Red Hat, Jetbrains and Unity Join Dotnet Foundation

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65 pointsoblio30 comments

I'm uninformed on this topic, but with all the movement in the .net community. How will it play out for Oracle and Java?

This is pure speculation I know, but would be interesting to read some opinions from people that is more informed. Any links or comments would be appreciated.

JVM developer here, I think it has legs, but it's a couple years away from truly being a threat to Oracle and Java. The VM, tools and libraries are a lot less advanced and or non-existent in comparison to JVM-langs.

If developers hop on board and start building the ecosystem then I think Oracle should be concerned. That could take anywhere from 2 to 10 years IMO.

I would say the biggest threat to Java is Oracle themselves.

Ding Ding Ding

"Perhaps the final straw was what Gosling said was Oracle's move to rein him in. indeed they owned Sun and thus Java, so they also owned its creator and his intellectual property, so it was up to Oracle to decide what Gosling or anybody else had to say about Java."

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Application-Development/Java-Creato...

But this doesn't really make any sense... Sun was a historically bad steward of Java after 1.5. Oracle has done a lot to advance the language and ecosystem since acquisition.

I have a foot in both communities.

Around 10 years ago, developing Java enterprise desktop applications was a mix of pure Swing, SWT, Eclipse RCP and Netbeans Platform.

Nowadays, just speaking from our customer projects, it is .NET for Windows only applications and Web for everything else.

The only place where Java based UIs still matters are on Android.

And on mobile OS, thanks to Oracle not caring about iOS and Windows Phone, C++ and C# are the languages to go for portable native apps. With Xamarin being made available for free, this will increase C# (including F#) usage for such applications.

Currently .NET Core lacks a story for portable UI framework, but if it gets one, it might win some adoption outside Windows for desktop apps, at least more than Java, as JavaFX doesn't seem to be wining much mind-share.

Another advantage of .NET Core is that Microsoft is having AOT compilation for free, while on Java world the best AOT compilers are commercial.

However for server side UNIX applications, mainframes and embedded devices, there Java might still rule, specially thanks to the existing developer base.

Also pure speculation from my part.

Well all this has been true for 10 years. There is still a little life in Java desktop GUIs because all the Java IDEs are written in Java (Netbeans and IntelliJ on Swing and Eclipse on SWT), but no one wants line-of-business software that is thick client, and they haven't since they realized they could reduce administration costs, and lose little functionality. (The exception in my experience being JPL which does some SWT work).

The two interesting things that actually compete with Java (JVM) would be LLVM and WebAssembly (or asm.js if you prefer).

On another front there is the thing that is competing with a big chunk of the SmallTalk OOP GUIs, a little thing called React. And actually Redux (or something like it) may turn out to be even more influential.

My take is that the functional dynamic DOM environment of the browser complete with run-time remote linking and compiling is like the harsh environment of Arrakis, which was the only thing that could have given rise to such hardy technology.

P.S. I really have to wonder how much a combination of `System.out.println` and `public static void main(String[] args)` cost the Java ecosystem. Not to mention the Date and File 'idioms'. Having nice collections and solid vm spec and implementation doesn't mean you get to ignore API usability. Sigh.

Honest question, how many .NET developers actually write stuff for Linux on the server side? How many have a significant user base?

I know there are a few desktop Linux apps (e.g. Tomboy, and Banshee), but I haven't seen many used in a daemon or as an Apache mod or the like.

Not many... yet.

No but I (and I suspect lots of former .net devs) am watching closely.

I'd really like to have true first class C# support on Linux.

Never really gotten on with Java so a lot of our backend stuff is in Python and PHP.

We (https://raygun.com) use a lot of .NET on the server side. We also use golang, node and a few other things, but a lot of .NET, specifically with C#.

We're very excited about being able to run on Linux. There's plenty of our back end worker processes that are in C# and being able to move them to Linux will be a big win for us (manageability, cost, etc).

I'm not sure what you consider a significant user base, but we do have 40k+ devs on our platform, and we process billions of interactions and software exceptions every month from many of the top 100 web sites and apps globally.

After looking at your site, you guys should definitely open a New York office.

Thanks :-) I've just relocated to Seattle to open a second west coast office. East coast or Dublin is next!

I've been writing an multiplayer game server for linux in mono using unity.

People complain about a lack of performance of headless unity servers but that hasn't been my experience. It seems very reasonable.

I did .net development for 8 years, left for ruby because frankly I got a 50k raise to do so, but right now I'm using core for my own projects which run on a Linux server in the cloud. I'm hoping as the platform improves that I'll be able to do it full time once again.

> Honest question, how many .NET developers actually write stuff for Linux on the server side?

very few now, but not much of the server-side .Net apps and services that I see is OS-specific. Reading data from a db and emitting json is not tied to Windows. It could move over quite quickly.

This code may be may be hosted on IIS, but if I could port it off that tomorrow onto lighter-weight lower-cost Linux EC2 instances tomorrow I would, and it's an easy sell to the non-technical manager: Save money and go faster.

"Tomorrow" may be a bit of an exaggeration - it's not quite ready yet and the upgrade will take more than a day. But it's not impossible, we will likely see it start to happen in 2016.

I would have loved it better if MS chose Cent over Ubuntu.

Most of the new university graduates from top schools are used to using Ubuntu.

Does CentOS provide any type of enterprise support options?

It's called RHEL.

The post doesn't refer to Ubuntu's unity but the game engine Unity.

You don't say!

Jetbrains will be acquired by either Microsoft or Google; I think it's a matter of weeks rather than months.

Google makes a logical partner for JB. IntelliJ is already the foundation of Android Studio and Kotlin could be a replacement for Java on Android.

Facebook uses its toolset. That's who I'm hoping for! But secretly, JB's stewardship of the developer perspective is worthy of independence.

Why do you think so? Microsoft has good developer tools of their own, Google is already building Android Studio on the IntelliJ platform without owning the company. Making IDE's is neither company's core business. I'm sure Jetbrains is a healthy business, but for Google or MS it's peanuts. I don't see the benefit of them owning Jetbrains, whereas on the contrary it would be good for Jetbrains to stay neutral.

Resharper and Jetbrain's other .net tools may be enough of a reason, would be a nice add to VS. Also, MS is clearly showing an interest in Linux ATM and I doubt VS is going cross platform anytime soon, and they know the value of good developer tools.

I hope not, I don't want to see developer tools come down to a choice of Apple, Microsoft or Google.

This is wild speculation at best. If anything, Jetbrains seem to be extremely resistant to being absorbed by larger entities.

If Google acquires Jetbrains, Kotlin winds up being a first class Android citizen, I think.

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