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Comment by Slartie | Hacker News Reader

What is the rationale behind using Windows on the servers? I'm wondering because the argument I usually hear is that someone high up in the ops team hierarchy declares "but we need everything in the AD, including all the servers, otherwise I can't sleep well". In your case however this apparently doesn't apply, as you do not register them in the AD.

Is it so the game devs don't need to write cross-platform server code?

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Real reasons for:

* One platform to develop on; back-end coders tend to go back and forth between client and server programming.

* Faster iterations. (just hit F5 in visual studio)

* IOCP

Stupid reasons for:

* Old IT Director denied the use of virtualisation software. (mac address randomisation wasn't great and it caused a switch crash if two people had the same mac)

* Windows licenses are really cheap compared to developer time. (until we went to cloud, where Microsoft charges insane amounts for licensing)

I no longer do windows development, but I miss it. It's strengths are greater than you portray.

The C# / .NET libraries are really beautiful and well thought out. I most often program in Python, and while the Python language is more concise and elegant than C#, the Python libraries are not nearly as well organized and consistent as C# / .NET. Java libraries are better than Python but worse than C#, and the Java language is worse than both C# and Python. As far as dev enivronments, Visual Studio is far better than Eclipse and roughly equal to Python's PyCharm. Because C# is compiled, it's far more performant than Python and a bit better than Java.

The downside of course, is that once you start down that road, you are pretty locked into the MS world.

If I was starting a new project, and I was a scrappy startup, I'd probably go with Python. But if I had resources (ie $$$) to support MS licenses and performance actually mattered, I'd go with MS. Side projects for experimentation may lead to node or rust. But sorry Java, can't really imagine a scenario where I'd start with you.

I was an exclusive Microsoft developer for a little over 20 years. It wasn’t until I started doing cloud deployments - like the original poster implied - that I started avoiding Windows as often as I could. Once you add Windows to the mix, everything gets worse - startup time, resource requirements, automation, snd costs.

Luckily, you can do C# without having to use Windows with .Net Core.

Ooh, you may be the perfect person to ask a question that I've been wondering about. Is .NET Core on Linux viable yet for serious use? I've done some tinkering with it and gotten a project working on MacOS but I did the development in Visual Studio on Windows. Is it realistic to do your development in Rider, with the open source version of msbuild for CI, and have it perform reasonably on Linux in production, without ever paying Microsoft anything?

My “Linux deployments” with C# have been Docker and Nginx with Fargate (AWS Serverless Docker) [1] and Lambda. I haven’t had to worry about performance, stability, or scalability. With either technology, you get scalability for free and with Fargate you don’t have to worry about cold starts.

I develop on Windows with Visual Studio and deploy to “Linux”. We use CodeBuild to compile and create the zip file (lambda) or Docker Container (Fargate).

CodeBuild basically is “Serverless builds”. It launches s prebuilt or custom Docker Container and you just run .net core “publish” command line and it gets all of your Nuget packages and then you run your standard packaging commands.

But Rider should be good. I’m a huge fan of R# and you can cross target Linux, Mac and Windows from either host using msbuild.

The kind of development we do probably wouldn't count as "serious" here on HN, but since the other comment didn't really answer your question, I'll pitch in. We've been developing using .NET Core/Linux/Rider for the past two years. It's been pretty great. Once you get to know the IDE really well, I'd say Rider beats VS in terms of functionality and usability.

.NET Core was developed with CLI usage in mind and common operations (like migrations/boilerplate generation) can be driven from CLI or Rider, you don't need VS for that.

You may have some problems with 3rd-party libraries. Not all of them have been ported to .NET Standard. I'd recommend checking your project's dependencies in advance. (We did have some problems with legacy COM-based cryptographic libraries and had to build a separate "microservice" hosted under Windows to offload this stuff to. COM stuff works fine under .NET Core, but only under Windows (obviously).)

If you are just running a few static Windows servers the slight cost benefit of running Linux for .Net Core is really not that great. If you are doing anything more dynamic where you are rapidly bringing “servers” up and down is where you see the real cost and performance benefits. Of course you can’t run Windows instances with either Fargate or lambda but even with regular ECS (Docker) or autoscaling EC2 instances where you can, Windows costs more, takes more resources, and is slower to launch.

Curious, how've your cross platform .Net Core experiences been? I've not done much with Linux, but when I was benchmarking writing to MS SQL with the same binary on Linux & Win10, .Net Core had about half the throughput to a remote SQL server instance than Win10. Not sure if others have seen this, but .Net Core seems to run significantly slower on linux vs Windows, in my experience.

Most benchmarks show either similar or better performance overall.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/44334125/net-core-on-win...

https://robertoprevato.github.io/More-about-Linux-vs-Windows...

But there are reported issues with sql:

https://github.com/dotnet/corefx/issues/24480

I share your high regard for C# and the .NET libraries but not your disdain for Java. Java the programming language is pretty ugly but the JVM is robust and there are other languages which compile down to Java bytecode. In your "scrappy startup" scenario I would pick Scala or Clojure long before Python, mainly because I'm skeptical of the idea of using a dynamically typed programming language for large-scale backend development - for human scalability reasons, not performance ones. Personally I'd also have to pass on Windows even in the AAA bigcorp scenario, because I prefer the tooling and open ecosystem around Linux and epoll isn't that much worse than IOCP.

Python supports gradual typing now, and it's made the experience for me much more manageable. Lots of good IDE integration too. It's not a replacement for Java's or Go's (etc...) type system, but it really increases the amount of Python you can support given the human scalability constraints.

Is C# more performant than Java? It was my understanding that HotSpot's JIT performs significantly more optimizations, almost bordering on esoteric magic, compared to the CLR.

I can understand how value types would help a lot, but it is possible to optimize Java to avoid object headers on the heap at great pain, i.e. avoiding classes and doing index arithmetic on flat arrays of values. Value types coming to the JVM will obviously help here.

Curious to hear about other advantages the CLR has.

>>(until we went to cloud, where Microsoft charges insane amounts for licensing)

Did you move to Azure?

No, it's cheaper on Azure (and they give us some huge discounts because we're so MS heavy).

But they really gouge the other cloud providers (GCP/AWS) on licensing, more than a third of our infra costs are just windows licenses (when looking only at cloud).

> more than a third of our infra costs are just windows licenses

Wow, that is brutal.

Does io_uring change the equation a little?

Yes, but I can't talk about future developments.

sufficed to say: my job is getting easier in future (thanks mostly to Stadia)

Kinda surprised to see some one say a positive thing about Stadia. I did a fair amount of network programming back when I was in the industry and I just don't see how it can work.

I see enough congestion on just the local 2.4Ghz spectrum out here it doesn't really matter how fast the data center is. Without some form of dead reckoning you don't have much room for error.

Oh, certainly. It's a serious undertaking for everyone, I'm skeptical to how it can work when we're often measuring screen latency and input latency in nanoseconds. (and obviously not getting sub-millisecond latencies on those significantly faster/less congested subsystems).

However, Stadia is Linux, so if you want to be on stadia, you need a linux version of the game, which means primitives need to be ported. Once primitives are ported for the client, they can be optimised for the server, then you have a linux gameserver. Which is good for me.

As a complete noob yet somehow armed with a VS enterprise license...could you elaborate on

>* Faster iterations. (just hit F5 in visual studio)

Is this some sort of code sync to servers/cloud?

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