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Comment by GordonS | Hacker News Reader

I find all the terminology and tooling around .NET Core... confusing.

Let's say I want to target RHEL and CentOS, versions 5-7. If I build mono on a machine with an old enough glibc, that single build will run on all of these. What's the equivalent to run on all these platforms with .NET Core?

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.NET Core is the equivalent to mono. However the .NET Core libraries were a bit painful to port to since they were limited. So they are expanding this with .NET Standard - which is an API specification - which you can use and work across all .NET platforms (.NET Framework, .NET Core, or Xamarin).

Keep in mind it sounds like .NET Standard basically is between the full .NET Framework and .NET Core. So if you have an existing .NET Framework app it's very possible it would just work on .NET Standard.

But what about runtimes? Can I have a single .NET runtime that will work with all of those Linux versions? With mono I have a single runtime that actually works across almost every Linux distro. Can I do this with .NET, have a generic runtime build that just works on everything?

From what I've seen, the answer is yes. Build once, drop and run anywhere.

Any information on how? I've been trying from a while, but keep getting bogged down in all the new terminology and constant changes to .NET Core...

.Net Core is the runtime. It's the cross platform version of the .NET Framework.

.Net Standard is just an API specification which will be implemented on the .NET Framework, .NET Core, or Xamarin runtimes. Technically it's a subset of the .NET Framework libraries. It's more of an improvement on .NET Core as it is bringing more APIs to that runtime.

So basically as long as you use the APIs in .NET Standard, your application can be compiled for any of those 3 runtimes.

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