Comment by bad_user | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bad_user | Hacker News Reader

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On C# having had an incomplete ECMA specification always lagging behind and source code made available under an obscure, non-open-source, legally tainting license acting as a boobytrap for anything commercial DOES NOT count as open.

Even now they are being disingenuous about license changes, witness for example the leadership of this project changing license from Apache 2.0 to MIT and being obtuse about the licensing of patents or about reasoning, not explaining clearly the drawbacks of the change: https://github.com/Microsoft/visualfsharp/issues/3440

OpenJDK happened on May 8, 2007, that's 10 years ago and you've got companies like Red Hat and IBM collaborating on it. By comparison .NET Core was released 2016, so that's 9 years later.

And the JCP might be a farce as far as standardisation efforts are concerned, but at least you've got multiple companies participating.

I'm replying this because I'm getting tired of Microsoft's marketing campaigns on this forum.

UPDATE:

Btw I actually applaud Microsoft's open sourcing efforts, I see myself using .NET in the future and I'm actively using Visual Studio Code and TypeScript at the moment. They've got fine people there working on dev tools, they always had.

But then I also see them engaging in what's basically racketeering, threatening Android phone makers with patents (i.e. if you can't innovate, litigate), having potential for becoming one of the largest patent trolls ever. And I also see them breaking user privacy in Windows 10. Therefore my view of them is balanced, as a large organization the left hand doesn't know what the right does, etc.

I cannot love them and even though I may have forgiven them for their past attacks on Linux and the open web, I can't forget their past that easily. And before you mention Google, Apple, Facebook, or other media darlings, check my history to see that I'm consistently ranting about all of them and the malevolence of one does not excuse the rest.

What I'm saying is that "Microsoft changed" messages make me feel nausea because it's been a clear marketing campaign and people fell for it. Let their actions speak, applaud and reward them when they do good, but don't put them on a pedestal and don't do marketing for them without getting paid for it.

> OpenJDK happened on May 8, 2007, that's 10 years ago and you've got companies like Red Hat and IBM collaborating on it. By comparison .NET Core was released 2016, so that's 9 years later.

You're comparing unequal things. OpenJDK was a community effort, while .NET Core is maintained primarily by Microsoft themselves. The correct comparison would be to .NET's community based alternative, which is Mono. Mono in turn had it's initial release in June 30, 2004, which is _13 years ago_, and 3 years before OpenJDK itself.

Further, note that Oracle only open sourced Java a year after Microsoft did .NET Core. One might even argue that Oracle only did so _because_ of .NET Core.

I'll note that I'm replying because I'm getting tired of Oracle's marketing campaigns on this forum.

> You're comparing unequal things. OpenJDK was a community effort

> The correct comparison would be to .NET's community based alternative, which is Mono.

This is disingenuous at best. OpenJDK was started with a huge codebase from the existing Sun JDK at the time, similar to how .Net core was started with with a Microsoft codebase.

Meanwhile Mono had to be written from scratch and was a far cry from being somewhat compatible for years after it started (e.g. capable of running a Visual Studio compiled .NET GUI program)

> Further, note that Oracle only open sourced Java a year after Microsoft did .NET Core

I'm not sure what you mean by "open source Java" in this context. The Java Community Process was started in 1998, and as said OpenJDK started in 2007. Java EE being open sourced like now would be much more comparable to Microsoft releasing something like Windows Presentation Foundation as open source, as it's a oft-used part of .NET but not part of the language per se.

No, you're wrong. You can compare Mono to GNU Classpath (1998) and the like. But OpenJDK was backed by Sun. They started releasing the source code in 2007. So it's 10 years ago.

You can read it all here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenJDK

OpenJDK would have died already if it wasn't for the Sun devs, nowadays Oracle, being the majority of contributors.

If you want to take mono into account as the first free .net implementation you should take GCJ into account as free Java implementation. GCJ was started in 1998....

"The correct comparison would be to .NET's community based alternative, which is Mono. Mono in turn had it's initial release in June 30, 2004, which is _13 years ago_, and 3 years before OpenJDK itself."

Mono is owned by Ximian, which is now a subsidiary of...Microsoft. This creates the rather odd situation where there are three implementations of .NET, but Microsoft controls all of them.

> I'm replying this because I'm getting tired of Microsoft's marketing campaigns on this forum.

I just think you're simply underestimating how many people actually like .net and spreads the love by free will. :)

> I'm replying this because I'm getting tired of Microsoft's marketing campaigns on this forum.

Can you substantiate that claim?

.NET is far beyond Java as a platform for building languages though, and it's been that way right from the start. Reified generics, value types, structs, unsigned integer type support, intermediate language actually optimized for compilation. It's pretty nice.

For some reason Java people have a near allergic reaction to it though.

Reified generics are more of a problem than a solution for language creators. .NET generics are too weak to be the base for languages with really powerful type systems like Scala or Haskell. Therefore implementing Scala on .NET required to use erasure and turned out to be more complex than in Java, which supports erasure "natively".

They might make languages harder to implement, but on this point C# definitely wins over Java/Scala for programmers.

I cringe a little when I need to write the occasional `def foo[T](list: List[T])(implicit tag: ClassTag[T])` in Scala.

Yep, the CLR/VM is a much better target for languages and C# fixes a lot of Java's mistakes.

It's such a shame that Microsoft until recently kept it so tightly controlled and Windows only. If that hadn't been the case the ecosystem (libraries and languages) might have been a lot more up to par when compared to the JVM ecosystem.

> kept it so tightly controlled and Windows only

Make no mistake: Microsoft knows very well what its business model is. Sun was very confused in that respect.

It never was "Windows only": https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc749640.aspx. Mono arrived shortly thereafter. And it had open spec right from the start. Patents were an issue though, there's no disagreement on that point.

Mono was awesome for what it was, and I'm not trying to denigrate those early efforts, but what it was wasn't really enough to say .Net wasn't Windows only. It didn't support WinForms, so no GUI application built for Windows would work on Mono without a major rewrite. Performance was also pretty bad in my experience. We built an optimization engine while I was in grad school for a funding source that mandated Windows, so we wrote the application in C#/.Net. I would develop on Linux at the time, and I built a version of the application that had no GUI so it could run under Mono, but it was easily an order of magnitude slower.

It kind of worked for a small slice of .Net programs (e.g., those that didn't rely on WinForms or any other non-implemented part of the stack). That's about all you could say for it for quite some time.

Mono was great for the kind of programs you would write in Python if you worked for a company that used any F/OSS under protest and held it at arms length when it couldn't avoid using it.

Not sure how it is now, but the requirement to run Windows in order to be a first class citizen, as .NET required for most of its existence, is enough to give me an allergic reaction.

I was the same. I lived only UNIX/Linux and knew where things were. In retrospect I can't even look into the mirror now on how wrong I was.

Don't take me wrong I am not saying that Windows / MS stack is better. It's just as good! And that's the beauty of it. I am glad microsoft is embracing other platforms so lets see how other people will react :-)

Sun had an allergic reaction to it.

Oracle has improved it quite a bit and all those features are being worked on for Java 10.

And they will be worked on for at least the next decade. Meanwhile .NET had them for 16 years now.

Meanwhile .NET is only fully usable in Windows for many types of applications, because .NET Core and Mono don't support all the platforms that Java does and .NET Standard 2.0 does not yet cover APIs like WPF, Systems.Drawing, WCF, ADO.NET drivers for all relevant enterprise databases.

So it is not like everything is better on the other side.

Note that I do enjoy using both of them since their early versions.

Java is not really usable anywhere for e.g. GUI, so there's that as well.

Android, UNIX and embedded devices (Ricoh printers and medical devices, factory controls for exemple) prove otherwise.

The only problema with Swing (JavaFX not so much) is developers coding away withouth bothering to learn how to use them.

Yes, out of the box they are harder to use than Windows Forms, but anyone that bothers to read books like "Filthy Rich Clients" is able to tame Swing.

When .NET Core starts supporting a standard GUI (eventually Xamarin.Forms) than runs in all platforms that Java GUIs run today, then you can complain.

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