Comment by oblio | Hacker News Reader

Comment by oblio | Hacker News Reader

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It's good that they're iterating rapidly.

> .NET Standard 1.6.1-preview1 was published as part of this release. .NET Standard 2.0 support is still coming.

I feel like the highlight of .NET Core will be when it finally implements .NET Standard 2.0. For those who haven't been following, .NET Standard 2.0 is basically the moment when .NET finally reaches cross platform consistency parity with Java.

For Java, if you want to have a cross platform app, you just target Java. For .NET versions pre-.NET Standard 2.0 you basically target a mishmash of platforms through "profiles". Imagine that when you're creating a Java app you'd be forced to chose a "profile" that says: this app supports JavaCombo12 (AIX, Solaris, Linux). Then once MacOS is available as a platform you have to choose JavaCombo13, that includes that. And then JavaCombo14, JavaCombo15, etc.

Oh, I almost forgot! To make things more interesting, each "combo" could have different APIs available! :)

> Imagine that when you're creating a Java app you'd be forced to chose a "profile" that says

They are called:

- Android Java

- Java Micro Edition

- Java Embedded Edition with (compact profile 1, 2 and 3)

- Java Standard Edition

- Java Enterprise Edition

- MicroEJ Java

- Real Time Java

Ah, then there are the vendor specific features like AOT compilation to native code or value objects like the Packet Objects in J9, just to give a possible example.

I thought someone would nitpick that statement. Microsoft supposedly designed and built .NET as a cross platform framework, even though they only released it for Windows. Yet many years after .NET's release and the .NET Core announcement, they're still struggling to achieve parity with Java.

Meanwhile, many of the examples from your list don't compare 1:1 with .NET profiles, because... :

- Android Java

This was caused by Google, so not $VENDOR's fault (Sun/Oracle).

- Java Micro Edition

This is moribund these days.

- Java Embedded Edition with (compact profile 1, 2 and 3)

This targets a totally different use case than the average .NET profile (most .NET profiles are minor variations on a theme).

- Java Standard Edition

Let's just call this "Java" :)

- Java Enterprise Edition

Let's call this "Java" + libs. It's hardly a profile, it's just Java + stuff on top.

- MicroEJ Java

I don't really know about this one.

- Real Time Java

See my comment about Java Embedded.

.NET profiles are IMO, just an ugly hack to re-add portability to a platform that was designed with portability in mind but then lost it gradually as it became more and more integrated with Microsoft platforms.

> - MicroEJ Java > I don't really know about this one.

A Java version produced by IS2T for micro-controllers, think cortex-M class.

http://www.microej.com/

http://www.stm32j.com/products/

As for the rest, we will have to agree to disagree. Regardless how it looks like in detail, in the daily work they are issues to take into account when trying to write portable Java code.

.NET was designed with portability across processors and Windows versions, not for other vendors. Even Rotor wasn't fully compliant with .NET 1.0.

When looking at the histories told by Don Syme related to the initial generics design and Ext-VOS, .NET genesis was to be a native platform based on COM. Actually something that was brought back to life as .NET Native + WinRT.

As for the .NET profiles, they aren't perfect, but as someone that works daily with Java and .NET, I look forward to them.

It'll almost have parity with Java once Core support .NET Standard 2.0.

One admittedly unpopular area it'll be missing is options for desktop development. I know that the trend these days is to use web interfaces, and web development makes up about 95% of my professional life.

But just out of curiosity, I picked up a WPF book from the library. And as I was reading through it, I remember thinking how nice it would be to be able to develop web apps with something like that. I suppose Silverlight would've been close, but it's dead these days.

It looks like JavaFX is broadly similar to WPF over in Java-land, and it appears to work fairly well cross platform. It doesn't look native on any platform, but that isn't always a deal breaker. Using Intellij's non-native looking Swing UI on my MacBook doesn't bother me, though I appreciate that not everyone feels that way.

I suppose this is my roundabout way of saying I'd love to have a decent cross platform .NET GUI framework. For anyone who wants this too, Avalonia looks like a good project to follow: https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia

It doesn't appear to support .NET Core yet, but last time I checked they expected to be able to relatively soon.

I have been doing projects in the healthcare area.

In what concerns computers to control robots, measurement devices and doing ETL data processing of data readers, on the projects I have been involved it is 100% Windows native WPF applications, with the legacy ones being a mix of MFC and Windows Forms.

I'm still confused on which .NET profile is entirely guaranteed to work on all platforms.

Wait a few months. Then target your library development at .net standard 2.0. It will work across the classic .net framework (Windows), the new cross-platform .net core (Windows, Linux, OSX) as well as the Xamarin (iOS, Android, Windows UWP).

That's exciting. I applaud MS for openly expanding to other platforms but the confusing profile names need to be simplified. IMHO, there should be two profiles .NET Universal and .NET Windows (a superset of .NET Universal).

something being a superset of a "universal" lib is not confusing?

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