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Comment by yrio | Hacker News Reader

What do you think about .NET?

It's probably the closest contender [1], but its non-Windows story is still a handicap, as is Microsoft's habit of making sweeping incompatible changes to their development platforms every 5-6 years.

[1]: A different philosophy that gives more control to the user in exchange for explicitness puts it ahead in some areas (structs) and behind in others (compilation quality, GC), but as a runtime engineer it's "technologically" behind (I work on OpenJDK so I'm biased, but I came to work on OpenJDK because that's where most interesting innovation in runtimes happens).

Microsoft doesn't make breaking changes. I have code that has survived three or four of your supposed cycles that still runs completely fine.

Microsoft did kill off or sunset some parts of the Framework. WCF, WWF, AppDomain, expression trees, dynamic, VB.

People who wrote WCF services in VB for a living are probably extremely disappointed.

Disappointed? Not at all! I worked with it many years ago.

Whilst WCF made some notable improvements over what existed within the ecosystem before it, it was still a sprawling, complex PITA and full of developer friction. Killing it off in this case was definitely the right thing to do :-)

Do you have anything to support that expression trees are being sunset? I haven't seen anything of the sort, unless you are talking about a deprecated library that has been replaced. But System.Linq.Expressions is still around.

I've also seen nothing about DLR being removed

.NET Core's cross-platform tools and ecosystem is wonderful. I'm working on a small team and the devs are using Windows, Mac, and Linux. CI builds are a mix of Windows and Linux, deploying to Linux.

I think their biggest weakness now is branding (.NET vs .NET Core). This will be fixed with .NET 5, which merges the two and will make all flavors of .NET cross-platform.

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