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abledon

Hypothetical Question: Is it at all possible to eventually merge Java and C# back into a single language? Say in 2030 ?

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No. Why would anyone do that? Maybe C# could be moved to the JVM, that could make some sense, but unlikely.

Not likely.

Something more likely. Two things.

Make dot NET a truly first class citizen on other platforms. Including the ecosystem of C# and dot NET libraries. Some of this may be difficult due to the long time that dot NET has been Windows only. There would have to be a clear boundary between APIs and features of the runtime and libraries that are only available on Windows. I think Microsoft is already making moves in this direction. But I don't keep up with it.

Make Java a truly first class citizen on Windows.

Funnily enough I was thinking an almost identical thing this morning. We had IKVM [0] for.NET, which if I understood it correctly allowed Java to run on the CLR (I probably misunderstood this).

I'm not entirely sure why Microsoft don't build something official to run Java code on the CLR/.NET, is it a technical or legal limitation, or simply that there's no business need?

[0]: https://www.ikvm.net/

An active fork of IKVM can be found here: https://github.com/jessielesbian/ikvm

Also re: using Java with .NET, there's also their Java Interop project which is used with Xamarin: https://github.com/xamarin/java.interop

It seems Microsoft is doing .net Java introp: https://github.com/dotnet/csharplang/issues/2517

It would be huge if they implemented a way to run java libraries from .NET. Be it ikvm or something else. This would immediately open up huge amounts of very interesting libraries to .NET. For example Bouncy Castle or Lucene. Years ago I worked on a document search app. Wrote it in .NET but then almost all interesting libraries were in Java exclusively or with an outdated .NET port. Being able to use the up to date java libraries would have been huge. This experience alone makes me reluctant to use .NET. The Java ecosystem is just much broader.

Not without an enormous amount of breaking changes. The severity of them would be so high that no C# or Java programmer could ever convert their existing code.

I'd say not or at least they'd have to abstract for different runtimes

.NET/Core and JVM have quite diverged I would think

What would be the point? C# has been well and truly tied to the Visual Studio / MSSQL / Resharper stack.

Of course you can use other IDEs (VS Code, Rider, Monodevelop) and databases (Postgres, Sqlite, Mysql, Oracle).

And plenty of people don't use R# either, but I prefer to do so.

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