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Comment by swasheck | Hacker News Reader

I've always loved C# but can't quite get past having to target specific .net frameworks and keeping the different frameworks in my different servers straight and targeting each of them differently. Maybe that'll change with .net core (and once I'm able to get that on my servers), but for now I've discovered a personal love for Go as a way around this for my small utilities.

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.NET Core 3.1 is a good LTS release and no time like the present to start migrating to it. Unlike .NET Framework, there's a lot less emphasis in .NET Core on machine-wide installs and a lot more capabilities for application-specific framework deployments. .NET Core even has tools to bundle all of your framework dependencies into a single "EXE", and tree-shaking that down to at least something of a minimal bundle size. There's a small but growing world of "go-like" small utilities that are entirely self-contained .NET Core dependencies.

https://www.hanselman.com/blog/MakingATinyNETCore30EntirelyS...

There's even fun experiments of AOT compiling to get interesting in "EXE golf" results from .NET Core applications such as getting them below 8 KB or running on Windows 3.1 (because why not):

https://www.hanselman.com/blog/NETEverywhereApparentlyAlsoMe...

.NET 5 will integrate further AOT capabilities as the Mono world is merging in, in addition to the raw marketing advantage that 5 > 4 for anyone still struggling to convince non-technical managers that .NET Core is a better investment in 2020 than .NET Framework.

.NET Core doesn’t need to be preinstalled. You can package a self contained deployment now and it comes with all of its dependencies. Or use one of the docker images to build on and run your app in a container.

The madness will hopefully be ending soon with .NET 5.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/introducing-net-5/

> There will be just one .NET going forward, and you will be able to use it to target Windows, Linux, macOS, iOS, Android, tvOS, watchOS and WebAssembly and more.

I say it's a mess but it isn't a hassle. Targeting .NET standard or .NET core is pretty straight forward and easy.

But the fact that all this exists is a mess and thankfully MS finally has a good plan to clean it up.

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