.NET JIT and CLR – Joined at the Hip
mattwarren.org
mattwarren.org
I also enjoy the internal blog posts from teams such as Edge at MS.
It is a great time for software to be sure.
Agree!
I would never have the time or expertise to work all this out just using WinDBG or similar. Having the source, including decent comments and things like the BOTR [0] is amazing for exploring the internals!
[0]: https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr/tree/master/Documentation/...
Out of interest, which books are you referring to? I'm always on the lookout for more (decent) technical books to read! :-)
I'm impressed with the testing approach.
Is anyone aware of similar articles/explanations of the JVM runtime and JIT?
Likewise, I really liked the SuperPMI tool, it's a very interesting way of testing
> Is anyone aware of similar articles/explanations of the JVM runtime and JIT?
I've recently come across this article about the JVM that discusses internals, http://blog.jamesdbloom.com/JVMInternals.html
Also the slides from this presentation a very good https://jpoint.ru/en/talks/5vqeeeo89yk6q8qmm0y8sg/
To be fair, Java and .NET fared well since then - both still exist and it it is very convenient to e.g. drop an old JAR in a project and just use it without issues.
https://github.com/dotnet/corefx/blob/master/Documentation/c...
> We generally don't accept change proposals that are in bucket #1.
...
> Bucket 1: Public Contract Clear violation of public contract.
> Examples:
> - Renaming or removing of a public type, member, or parameter
> - Changing the value of a public constant or enum member
> - Sealing a type that wasn't sealed
> - Making a virtual member abstract
> - Adding an interface to the set of base types of an interface
> - Removing a type or interface from the set of base types
> - Changing the return type of a member
> - ...or any other incompatible change to the shape of an API
Silverlight was unfortunate but overall good for the web. You must realize that even Flash, the vastly larger competitor, also died and gave way to much better browser native APIs.
I don’t know about Windows workflow but it’s important to keep in mind the difference between abandoned products vs the changing software trends landscape.
.NET 1.0 was released in 2002 ;-)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.NET_Framework_version_history...
C# as a language is very nice to use. 1.0 was lacking a few crucial features, such as generics (while using 1.1, I was using a code generator to create strongly-typed collections). It sort of felt like Python at the time - Batteries included. Even at 1.0, the standard library was quite extensive. By 2.0, generics were there, and that ameliorated my biggest complain with the language. Every iteration since has been a boon to developer productivity.
Some features, such as Linq are hit & miss for me. On one side, Linq is great in that it allows one to succinctly express complicated logic. On the other hand, it also hides a lot of complexity and it can be hard to determine the algorithmic complexity of even the simplest Linq statement, unless you closely examine all of the types involved.
Also, not to be forgotten is the tooling. From day 1, tooling for .Net (C# in particular) was top notch, and it's only gotten better over the years. IDE support was great (except lacking edit & continue) - Intellisense was fast and worked incredibly great (and fast), with the built-in support for XML documentation, its was also helpful & informative. Compared to the Intellisense support for C++, which was so bad I've sworn off VS for C++ work (last time I tried was VS 2005, when it'd either hang or crash often) and rely upon command-line Vim instead.
I don't do much C# currently, but I still love the language. I'm probably about 1% C# and the rest C++ currently.
Edit: I'm aware that C# was largely born after MS's ill-fated embrace of Java (J#, IIRC) and the suit from Sun. I see C# as an embrace what worked, kill what didn't. Java still has some large annoying works (Exception specs), and C# said: we don't want that.Even C++ realized that exception specs sucked and ditched them in 2011, but Java's still clinging to them. Also: objects vs value types.
So I have considered F#, but it doesn't seem that compelling. Also it seems like the tooling is worse on other platforms.
Currently it has three different ways of using event handlers.
The original way, anonymous delegates and lambdas.
The semantics of for loop which were fixed around C# 6.0, need to hunt down release notes for this one.
Something like .NET Native and .NET Core should have been there on v1.0 instead of tying the runtime to the OS.
What exactly changed with a for loop?
The runtime is different from the c# programming language. Originally when this all started, Windows was the focus and Linux/open-source were not an option, so saying it should be there from v1 doesn't fit when there was only one OS that it was planned to run on.
I got it wrong, it was foreach, not for.
The semantics for the variable were wrong when given into a closure, it was a breaking change in C# 5.0 to fix it.
https://www.jetbrains.com/help/resharper/AccessToForEachVari...
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12112881/has-foreachs-us...
Thing is, there isn't just one version of Windows, and updating the CLR in place can be lots of fun, to the point many enterprise postpone it ad infinitum.
This was the original driving idea for .NET Core, when ASP team started doing it, making it easy to allow IT to update Windows production servers to newer versions, porting to other platforms came afterwards.
Are you stuck on .NET Framework? If you arent then .NET Core already solves all of the maintenance problems by being deployed completely self-contained. It's a similar problem with many other language toolchains as well and .NET Framework at least saves work by being a single install that can be automated away with group policies. Enterprises postponing software updates is a problem with the enterprise, not the framework.
Quite competitive with msvs, if not better
- Industrial strength language with static types. I used Python and JS a lot, I'm passing.
- Good tooling support, not every language has this.
- Good support in general, backwards compatibility (or side by side support).
- Game development possibilities with Unity.
- Mobile development with Xamarin.
- WebAssembly support already in motion with Blazor.
- Not cool, which is exactly what I want in tech. Fads don't belong in tech. Means more job opportunities for me too.
- Good serverside platform with .Net Core.
- Native on the most popular desktop platform.
- With full MS stack, opens up the option of being the sole IT guy at a small to midsize company. It's certainly possible.
- Similar to Java, lets me move over with minimal disruption if the job market demands.
- Write once, jobs everywhere. I can move back to the smaller area that I'm from. I live in Chicago right now but I've worked in 3 countries, 3 US states & .Net is popular enough in all those locales.
- Career stability, less technical churn in the C#/SQL space (and Java). I'm very tired of flavor of the week scripting languages that are many times really used heavily in NYC & SF.
- I'm not looking to learn new languages all the time. I'm looking to perfect myself as a consummate professional developer. I want to fully envelop all the things that I think people should, discrete mathematics, design patterns and I think learning new languages is great but there are other ways to become an exceptional programmer.
For me, it was C# or Java to base the next leg of my career on. I like the abstraction layer they're on, on a technical basis I think they nailed it. Sometimes newer isn't better. This isn't going to be popular, because a lot of people believe in Javascript and invested heavily there career-wise. I didn't want to and wasm is going to chunk out 25% of the single language fullstack market from Javascript in 5 years anyway and keep taking. Ideally going forward on the web side, I would only do a SPA with Blazor or static pages.
That's why I like C#. I'm looking forward to many relatively stable years in my career within the C#/SQL world without the trends. If it collapses, Java is in a similar situation marketwise.
Been with it since it came out in 2002. I wouldn’t start a new project on the platform in 2018, even .net core.
It's one of very few fullstack solutions available for game (serverside+Unity), mobile (serverside+Xamarin) and web (serverside+Blazor), maybe you want a WPF or UWP app too. Or all of it for a single stack shop for anything you want. Nothing else is pulling all of that off today, and may never. MS is doing a fantastic job keeping it vibrant, alive and supported. You're not really convincing me without more than what you left there. A few years ago, yes, I would've agreed 100% with the general attitude but the tide has turned. I dove in deep on Python, got back out before I hitched my career to that.
To specifically address the points I disagree with.
-Tooling falling off? Examples? I've worked around or with it for a decade now and never saw the tooling fall off.. it's best in class. I really don't understand how this is any worse than anything else.
-Build toolchain? An example of a dire toolchain is Javascript's, not C#'s. That is a mess that I want nothing to do with. I can't get behind this one either.
-Roadmap schizophrenia? They have it figured out now on the .Net Standard and Core. Your alternative is Python 2 to 3 transitions. That was the real mess.
-Integration with other Microsoft products? Good or bad, you probably aren't going to find better integration with MS products than using .Net. I can't get behind this complaint either.
That said if anyone has attacks on .Net I'm willing to listen but I don't see it. It's the worst, except for all the others.
Build toolchain. MSbuild performance sucks among other things. Also Consider VSTO build toolchain. We have to ship VS on build machines for example which is expensive and unnecessary. Even if we throw ridiculous IO capacity and CPU at build we hit a wall quickly where there is no return. On top of that managing framework upgrades across tens of solutions is a nightmare.
Roadmap schitzophrenia. The core is relatively stable. I’m talking about the ecosystem of abandonment over the last 10 years or so. See my post history for a list of just MSFT projects. Ancillary third party libraries in nuget also suffer from sudden disinterest from the maintainers and abandonment on a regular basis.
For your use cases it’s probably the least bad option but on the server side or the desktop these days I wouldn’t use it. Qt/ex/python on the desktop. Python or Go on the server side depending on the use case required.
The key thing is developer latency and maintenance cost. While the runtime performance is good the dev side of things is not. It gets expensive quick.