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Comment by maxpert | Hacker News Reader

With Linux support AOT compliation and other goodies I wonder how many people will prefer writing backends in .NET over Java.

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I think that Java ecosystem is more diverse. There are multiple JDK implementations. There are a lot of OpenJDK builds from different vendors, including paid support options. There is an extremely mature library and tooling ecosystem. While I don't think that JVM is superior to .NET VM, it's not inferior either. .NET supports value types while JVM support some very advanced garbage collectors. And, of course, JVM development is not over. Hopefully, in a few years there will be value types in JVM as well. Java is inferior to C# as a language, but there's Scala or Kotlin for those who want better language and they are more on-par with C#. And for many people Java language is enough to write good code and they don't really need any more features. May be simple language is a feature in itself.

I don't see any strong reasons to switch to .NET from Java for those who heavily invested in Java already. But I think that .NET is pretty strong, so the same argument could be made for the other direction, for folks who are fluent in MS infrastructure and want to tackle Linux, .NET probably is good enough to keep using it.

Agreed about the Java ecosystem. Years ago I worked on a text indexing and searching application. All the interesting stuff was in Java and if you were lucky, there was some outdated and buggy .NET port. C# is a very good language but if I had to star5 sei thing from scratch i would probably choose the Java world just because of the availability of libraries.

.NET could get a huge boost if there was an ability to use Java libraries. There was KVM.NET but that looks pretty dead.

Kotlin is getting a pretty solid push as a server-side language too. Everyone I have talked to that uses it is a proponent.

Java has GraalVM whose AOT technology[1] is being adopted by pretty much every framework out there.

[1] https://www.graalvm.org/reference-manual/native-image/

No thanks. I've been writing .Net since before day one and quite frankly I've been buggered around enough now to run as far away from this as possible.

Interesting, I always felt C# was a step ahead of Java, while the JVM was some steps ahead of the CLR.

The language is absolutely brilliant and I love it. It's the vendor's schizophrenia that's the problem. I've run out of fingers to count things that have been deprecated painfully on after being promoted as the next greatest thing and sold hard. This has cost me, my clients and my employers ridiculous amounts of money to unfuck.

Totally fair, anyone in the Microsoft development ecosystem has to learn to be incredibly skeptical of anything new. Anytime I spent on adopting Silverlight was essentially wasted. I had one client that had adopted a random WYSIWYG released by Microsoft to design WCF services, when anyone experienced in the ecosystem knew it had abandonware written all over it.

Of course, other ecosystems have their own versions of this. But Microsoft might be the only one that essentially controls an entire ecosystem and still manages to give devs whiplash.

Exactly. Yes I interviewed at a company where Silverlight and WCF was the future and they'd just rewritten everything in it. I didn't see it with the way everything was going. I dread to think of what happened to their business when the rug was pulled out overnight.

"Microsoft says you need to start funding your entire product to be rewritten from scratch"

I don't know how long ago you're speaking about, but Silverlight and Flash were at their end of days even back in ~2006. Apple just nailed the coffin shut. That's not Microsoft's fault, there was a sea change in the industry away from browser plugins and these types of platforms.

Apropos WCF, well we got JSON and no-one outside of "enterprises" were doing SOAP/WSDL et al any more and it was pretty much done. That's not really a fault of the vendor, the world moved on. At the end of the day, as a software development house you have to make strategic choices, regardless of vendor. And you can still build WCF apps today, sure maybe not in .NET Core, but they'll still be supported for donkeys years by MS, but who'd want to?

Silverlight wasn't even born until 2007, so it's hard to see how it was dead in 2006. :)

Or maybe you're saying it was DOA?

> Or maybe you're saying it was DOA?

Pretty much. The only time I've ever seen Silverlight apps in the wild were for streaming use (Sky/Now TV for example).

Very true. I don’t trust anything new MS is putting out. The risk of being abandoned soon is just too high.

Not that my opinion means much, but I'm a UI/UX guy and I've always had a much better experience learning and using C# as opposed to Java.

What would you choose for server code?

Probably Go at this point in time. They care about API stability, keeping scope focused and about technical improvement instead of marketing. And the language is nice to use! There are warts but they take a measured structural approach to resolving them and caring about the change.

Go might care about their own API stability, but it took them years to stop doing direct syscalls on macOS (where it is not a stable ABI); and last I checked, they were still doing that on BSDs.

As for technical improvements, well... it's a language that took, what, almost a decade to add generics? And that's because the designers were claiming that everybody else is doing them wrong, and they want to figure out how to do it right. Now that they're finally adding them, turns out that they look exactly the same as everybody else's.

You have to do direct syscalls if your lowest level is not C. I don’t see your point. Perhaps vendors should have stable ABIs?

Vendors do have stable ABIs: libc. You don't have to be writing in C to make calls into C libraries, and it would be rather strange for a language to be unable to use the C ABI, yet claim to be a systems programming language. You might notice that no other language has this problem.

Besides, Go does use libc on macOS (now), and always used Win32 API calls on Windows, so it clearly can be done. It's just that for a while, they've decided that being fast on macOS was more important than respecting the ABI stability guarantees from the OS.

Are you saying that .NET API isn't stable? I have code that works from .NET 1.1 back in 2004.

I wouldn't use any of their flavor of the month tech they release from the conferences. But the .NET framework has been pretty stable over the last 15 years.

No it doesn’t. Try it on .Net 5.0.

It works with .NET Standard, .NET Core and .NET 4+ and I am pretty sure when I do the upgrade it will just work.

I was going to say the same, but you said it much nicer than I would have done.

.NET/C# are great platforms, it's the median .NET/C# developer and the general culture of working at one of these shops that ruins it.

Just decades of over-engineering OOP "best practices" baggage that is impossible to shake off.

Why do people "move" to new languages? Mostly to leave the baggage behind.

Good points there. I have to agree.

Wherever you run to, you will get buggered around a bunch and then run somewhere else.

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