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Comment by bbkane | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft seems like "a house divided" when it comes to opening .NET. They open source the core language, but have different proprietary dev tools (debugging for one) you need to pay for.

https://isdotnetopen.com/ goes over these in more detail, but I'd rather use an ecosystem where I don't have to worry things will be progressively locked down in the future.

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I guess I'm not that worried about it. There are other debuggers available. JetBrains has a proprietary one. Samsung's is MIT licensed and linked in your link.

It seems like they spooked the community with this VSCode plugin thing but it also feels like not that big a deal. MS wants VSCode to interface with things they can sell along with the open source. Is that so bad? I get the worry that the MS support of OSS could dry up but that could be said for all kinds of OSS projects with corpo backers, no?

The debugger is part of Visual Studio, which is a paid product. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to not publish the source for it.

Yeah, but the general standard is for open languages to either have an open debugger (e.g.: V8 JS) or else otherwise have support for an open debugger interface (e.g.: Rust via GDB).

It's not strictly unreasonable for MS to offer a proprietary debugger, but it is bass-ackwards for the core .NET team to not offer an open source debugger or open standards compliant debugger interface to go with their open source language.

The debugger interface is open (it's part of the CLR itself), and so is the debug symbol file format. However the debugger interface is low-level, making writing a debugger engine from scratch fairly complex. The complaint is that Microsoft uses a restrictive license for their higher-level wrapper around the low-level API.

But it should be possible to write independent .NET debuggers -- I believe Jetbrains has done so, Rider can debug C# code without the problematic Microsoft component.

Samsung did it too

Roslyn (the open-source compiler) can create open-PDB debugging files that are also an open-source format. You are 6 years too late to make that comment.

And I think lldb works with .NET apps.

Even if Microsoft did release an OSS debugger with less features/performance than the proprietary debugger, you know the narrative would instantly change to complaining about keeping features/perf back for paid users.

Visual Studio Code also uses the debugger and that's a free tool marketed as open source. The open source version (VSCodium) doesn't ship a C# debugger for this reason.

There's nothing inherent about the debugger that forces it to be in visual studio. There was a moment, circa 2016 or so, when it could have been opened and then collaborated on with Jetbrains. Instead, MS leadership circled the wagons due to OSS FUD that they get sometimes, and Jetbrains was forced to build a better debugger that's also tied to its IDE.

Of course, this being open source might enable third parties to invest in their own tools; including debuggers. Part of that deal is that developers are no longer passive by-standers. If it bothers you enough you might fix it or help fund somebody else to fix it.

Providing the basics as open source and then charging a little for some extras should not be the end of the world. You see the same in the Jetbrains ecosystem where e.g. the community edition of Intellij is free and open source but they have a paid version with a lot of extras.

Paid products for developers are not as common as they used to be but we are talking about tools that improve productivity a lot for people that make a lot of money using those tools. Developers (my self included) are oddly stingy when it comes to spending on software but at the same time think nothing of blowing a few thousand dollars on hardware.

There's a free version of VS which has a full debugger. Am I missing something? Are we talking about debugging the .NET code itself?

There is VS Code, which is not a version of VS, is free, and has this debugger.

There is also VS Community, which is a free version of VS, has this debugger, but has fairly strict licensing limitations (e.g. it can't be used in corporations).

I have debugging in Rider (JetBrains' .NET IDE), what nuance am I missing about the debugger argument? Other than Rider also being a paid product, I guess.

JetBrains had to reimplement their own debugger to get around this.

And that one isn't usable outside of Rider either.

what? this is crazy. I have been using .net since 2001 and they have always had a community version or a free way of developing. There is no more concern using MS than there is using any other platform in my opinion. They are divided because they have different audiences, its ok, they are different service lines (corporate vs startup)

Many developers distrust closed source developer tools, whether they are free or not.

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