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Comment by rch | Hacker News Reader

Excited? Having just inherited a previously outsourced ASP.NET MVC application, I feel like announcements like this ammount to tiny, tentative steps towards tolerable. Portability work should have started over a decade ago.

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I think it's better to cheer loudly when we see a monolith move an inch. Better to say you're going the right way than to say you have a mile minus an inch to go.

Last week I might have agreed with you, but it is really difficult when I'm actually dealing with this mess.

Is the pain because it is ASP.NET MVC, or because you're trying to save an outsourced project? I've done that, and I've done greenfield MVC projects; one of these is much more painful than the other.

For better or worse, I have a broad set of painful experiences from which to draw comparisons: PHP, Java (Swing, Spring, OSGI, RMI, Nuxeo), Fortran 77, Managed C++ circa 2004, "modern" Pearl, and even some remarkably awkward Python.

My chief complaint is that it takes less effort to grab an open compiler and get to work on 20 y.o. Fortran (for instance) than it takes to spin up the whole stack that this relatively trivial MVC app requires[-]. Some years ago I would have had to buy the Lahey Fujitsu Fortran compiler, but those days are over as far as I can tell.

Substantive greenfield projects (any platform) are marvelous by comparison; not even in the same ballpark.

[-] Note that most of the platform pain goes away if you're a fungible MS dev, but then there's a more subtle and insidious pain for you to deal with down the road.

Portability work started nearly 2 decades ago. .NET has been multiplatform from the start. Around the first release they even had an "open" source version that ran on BSD, thought not with all the libraries.

I get that you can jump through certain hoops to make cross-platform development possible, but the applications I've seen are 'all-in' with MS (even to the point of inappropriately depending on system services like ftp). Portability simply isn't the norm, and it's disingenuous to claim otherwise.

Yes, please let's not try to revise history. I've seen Microsoft evangelists play games like this, and IMO it's a terrible way to promote your preferred platform. .NET Core will stand on it's own merits, it doesn't gain from inaccurate statements about the past.

The actual design and standard are designed to be multiplatform. You can see it in a lot APIs, like Environment.NewLine -- not needed if you only target Windows.

MS released Rotor as a proof of concept. It's just an argument over implementations, which were admittedly lacking. And the standard parts are smaller than the whole .net bits MS shipped.

.NET was multi-language and C# was an open standard; .NET itself was not multi-platform. I was there at the start. I was a beta tester for the first Visual Studio.NET. The reason Mono exists is because C# is an open standard and Miguel and Xamian (or whatever they were calling themselves then) were able to create .NET from the ground up, called Mono.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.NET_Framework

I think MichaelGG is thinking of the Rotor "shared source" implementation for BSD, which was released around the same time as .NET for Windows as a proof of concept for implementing the .NET standards on other platforms. (These standards included CIL and the Common Type System, not just C#.) But as Michael says though it fell way short of full .NET, lacking many libraries and a lot of the optimisations of the Windows .NET implementation; and it wasn't open source in that you couldn't fork it, you could only look at the code 'under glass.'

The .NET design has always been multiplatform. MS has released code over a decade ago to demonstrate this: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc749640.aspx

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