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Comment by mikewarot | Hacker News Reader

Other than causing a bunch of otherwise unnecessary updates for Windows users, what good was/is .NET? I've never seen the point, and it got even weirder for me when MONO came out.

[Edit] Thanks for explaining it to me. I've missed a decade of computing.

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Sorry but this comment is so out of touch with reality.

.NET is huge in enterprise. There are easily billion plus distinct lines of .NET (C# or VB) code running on companies we don't even know the name of.

Now with .NET Core, .NET Foundation and the push for open sourcing, the rate of new C# lines written per day is probably increasing even more.

C# jobs are plenty. Much more than some hyped languages around here. And it shows no sign of slowing down.

By the way, C# is no longer tightly associated with Windows for a few years already. It's common for C# code written today to empower a microservices fleet deployed over a large kubernetes infrastructure.

As an example the other day I was writing low level protocol code in F# (but could do the same in C#), allocating a decent byte array on the stack (stackalloc), putting value types in it, bit-shifting and putting those numbers in place in the same byte array without a single heap allocation nor a single unsafe block of code or needing other techniques like byte array pooling. In previous days the only choice often was jumping into C/C++ and writing extern functions that usually had an associated penalty especially in hot loops where we want to employ this style of coding. Made me realize how far the .NET Core ecosystem has come in the last few years. When having to go back to Java I do see the performance penalties that I didn't see many years ago.

And yes this code is all going to be hosted in containerized Linux infrastructure. Our tests showed much better single and multi-threaded performance for our cases than many other popular frameworks across many languages we evaluated. YMMV but IMO the ecosystem has made up a lot of ground in a small space of time.

The point is not so different than the point of the JVM.

So, the idea was to support Windows on other architectures? That didn't really pan out.

The idea was to have a virtual machine based language like java was. Originally, it was not cross platform. Today it is. I know I'm not going to convince you to give a try but C# is a very neat and capable language, and the CLR is a blazingly fast runtime.

Thanks for explaining it.

Many of the things people switched to C# for were already present in Delphi. It's a shame the Borland/Embarcadero got greedy and started pricing most of us out of the market.

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