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Comment by WorldMaker | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft here sounds extremely hesitant to ever do the ".NET Framework 5.0" release that would break the .NET Framework world necessary to push a new CLR Runtime out. .NET Framework 3.x and .NET 4.x have all still been using the CLR 2.0 (for the most part), and the risk at upgrading the CLR is far greater than the .NET Framework 1.0 to .NET Framework 2.0 era. (Certainly the "reward" of the new mostly performance-oriented features in .NET Standard 2.1 doesn't seem worth it at first glance, not compared to the CLR 2.0 upgrade for generics.)

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> Microsoft here sounds extremely hesitant to ever do the ".NET Framework 5.0" release that would break the .NET Framework world necessary to push a new CLR Runtime out.

Yeah, I think the question is "will Framework be the slow moving, but 'living' component you target for long-term, but perhaps not eternal, stability on Windows platforms or will it be a legacy component that Windows is burdened with only for backward compatibility with older apps".

I think Microsoft has sent signals out which point in each of those directions, but not yet converged clearly on one or the other.

Yeah, I think Microsoft has changed its mind a couple times too many. With .NET Core's original announcement it sounded like .NET Framework was legacy and in mostly maintenance mode. With .NET Standard < 2.0 it seemed clear that .NET Core might move way too fast for .NET Framework to catch up, but maybe it was possible for it to catch up eventually, though there was some question there because there were some APIs it wasn't clear if .NET Framework would adopt at all for a bit there. I think .NET Standard 2.0 gave some at Microsoft a calm sense of ".NET Framework can keep up surely" as .NET Core paused to catch up with Mono/Xamarin's API footprints, but .NET Standard 2.1 here seems to make it clear that Microsoft realized again it can't keep up with .NET Framework. Definitely not in the short term, and probably not ever.

It would be great if they better articulated that "probably not ever", but I can't blame them for not doing that when we all know that a bunch of enterprise devs and HN/Reddit/Slashdot randoms would be out in force with pitchforks and torches if they did.

they have done it; it’s called “.NET Core”.

I feel that way, too, but I understand some of the reasons people still want to see a ".NET Framework 5.x".

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