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I concur! Coming from Java world to .NET/C#, I was initially very sceptical of Microsoft's offering. Now, I expect to be paid a heavy premium if I ever have to go back to Java.

Also, there's a ton of world class third party tooling around .NET that really makes everything better. Shout-out to LINQPad for saving me literally 100s of hours on testing, queries and quick POCs.

For b64 conversion, dumping SQLite to CSV (or vice versa) and other BS mapping tasks, I still reach for LINQPad pretty much every time.

Loading all of VS2022 is not fun if you just need to turn an image file into a stream of base64.

As a long time Java professional who hasn't experienced .NET what would you say are the biggest advantage points of .NET vs a typical modern Java setup with say, IntelliJ, SpringBoot, maven/gradle etc?

I have very little experience with Java, but I tried building a web app with Spring Boot once. Figuring out even the most basic things, like how to get server-side templates to work, took forever. Many things documented around the web just flat out didn’t work. I got it to a workable state though.

In the modern ASP.NET Core, things are much better organized and documented. The framework has far less magic involved. No magically auto-generated repositories, no @Autowired magic, and far less use of annotations. Things just make more sense.

As for the language itself, C# is nicer in many regards. Even basic things like properties instead of hand-written or Lombok-generated getters and setters, or operator overloading where it makes sense, lead to clearer code.

Regarding IDEs: I hate Visual Studio, but JetBrains Rider is basically IntelliJ for C#.

Its literally IntelliJ for c# lol. Same base system just tied into the Roslyn compiler chain and using their proprietary .NET debugging system instead of whatever they use for the JVM. And while I still use VS at work on personal projects (in both c# and f#) I've switched fully over to Rider and enjoying the experience a great deal, so anyone used to IntelliJ can get a pretty comparable experience from their IDE right out.

Not sure when did you try it out, but there are things like Spring Initializr where it really is just clicking together your initial setup.

Also, there are plenty of old, no longer working code samples on the internet for spring, but the official documentation is really great and should be preferred over some random blog that likely 6 years old already.

I tried Spring Initializr. I made the mistake of picking human-friendly Freemarker templates instead of the XML abomination that is Thymeleaf, and things went to hell.

And can you show the nice official documentation? All my searches back then pointed me only at blogs and stuff. All of them full of outdated advice — for example, the version I started with was one of the first to change the default file extension for Freemarker from `.ftl` to `.ftlh` for some invalid reason, but none of the online blogs were updated for it, I found out after a few hours of trying out random things when I stumbled upon the change log for that release. (The reason was allegedly “security”, but what stops them from disabling the insecure features and keeping the extension?)

Another thing that was woefully under-documented was the default security thing, it also took me forever to figure out how to get a login page showing and working.

> it's not merely 'batteries included'—it's 'everything under the Sun included'

If you really want to get a sense for how broad the APIs are today:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.numerics...

I've been working on a custom game engine in .NET for about a year now, and I still haven't had to pull down a 3rd party nuget.

I got a rewrite for Matrix3x2, Matrix4x4, Quaternion, and Plane in for .NET 8 as well.

It should provide up to 48x perf improvements as compared to .NET 7

Awesome!

I believe Vector4.Transform(Vector4, Matrix4x4) is my hottest path right now, but as I get into more complex scene graphs, Matrix4x4.Multiply(Matrix4x4, Matrix4x4) will likely pop into the profiler.

For `Vector4.Transform(Vector4, Matrix4x4)` we had `5.22ns` to `2.46ns` (~53% faster)

For `Matrix4x4.Multiply(Matrix4x4, Matrix4x4)` its a bit less at `10.04ns` to `8.38ns` (~17% faster)

The main improvements tracked by: * https://github.com/dotnet/perf-autofiling-issues/issues/1144... * https://github.com/dotnet/perf-autofiling-issues/issues/1148... * https://github.com/dotnet/perf-autofiling-issues/issues/1146...

There are some more cases to be improved. `Matrix4x4.Multiply` in particular I need to update to use a proper SIMD implementation rather than its current scalar implementation.

If you have any other core scenarios where it's important, let me know and I can try to focus on them sooner, rather than later ;)

Thanks for the detailed notes!

I have no special requests at this time. I'll dig into the above issues and comment on GH as needed.

What are you using for rendering out of curiosity? Doing it raw? Vulcan? DirectX? OGL?

Raw. Software only. Pixel shading is done in code with methods defined per scene object. The delivery to eyeballs is via streaming images to browser over web socket. Absolutely no GPU is required (this is a central design objective).

That's really fascinating, thanks for the details!

Wow. In C++ that would require GLU or glm. I actually didn't know things like this were in the standard library.

> .NET languages are amazing. It's fairly easy to program in any style in C# now:

It is very hard explaining to Java programmers why Java is so bad. Country of The Blind (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Country_of_the_Blind) is very apropos.

C# is an incredible language that makes it easy to express a multitude of ideas from a wide range of programming paradigms.

I've been jumping back and forth since 1995.

Recently .NET has been very good, but whenever I program in it now and then there are things I miss badly from the Java side.

> It is very hard explaining to Java programmers why Java is so bad

Referencing a short story doesn't really explain it to anyone.

I do both ecosystems since they exist, C# > Java while JVM > CLR, plus even if not standard Java, the biggest selling OS is powered mostly by it.

Why JVM > CLR?

This reads like marketing blurb but it's really like that. It just does everything you might need it to.

> This reads like marketing blurb but it's really like that.

Heh, I was afraid of being called out as a Microsoft shill. You're right, though—.NET really is that good.

I'll go ahead and say that open-sourcing the .NET ecosystem is the single best decision that Microsoft has taken in recent history.

Is .NET a viable platform for cross-platform data analysis and visualization tool development now? Python is king here, it sure has everything, but I'm tired of its non-type-safety.

From what experience I've had, C# is a very ergonomic language, with good balance between an expressive static type system and do-whatever-when-needed dynamic features.

Another language I'm looking at is TypeScript, since everything's in browser anyway, and browsers got fast.

Guess I just like Anders Hejlsberg.

> Is .NET a viable platform for cross-platform data analysis and visualization tool development now?

I'm not sure there's anything as powerful as Pandas + Numpy + Matplotlib in C# (or almost any other language, for that matter), but it looks like there are a few attempts.

Microsoft.Data.Analysis: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/microsoft.data....

SciSharp: https://scisharp.github.io/SciSharp/

ScottPlot: https://github.com/ScottPlot/ScottPlot

Plotly.NET: https://github.com/plotly/Plotly.NET/

>visualization tool development

This for for sure not. They do not have capable multi-platform UI.

See Meadow and Nano Framework for embedded,

https://www.wildernesslabs.co/

https://sandervandevelde.wordpress.com/2022/12/15/fun-with-n...

Plus many "embedded" scenarios have an OS capable of running regular .NET as well.

The problem of .NET versus other alternatives like Java (as an example), is the 2001 - 2014 legacy of being mostly Windows focused, which hinders the choice of libraries and tooling versus those alternatives.

For example, coming back to the embedded scenario, .NET has nothing comparable to PTC, Aicas or the endless variants of JVMs shipping on copiers, electricity meeters, M2M gateways and such.

"any c# style" describes our code base pretty good, totally unreadable

I don't understand why anyone find a mix of style unreadable. That's like saying you cannot read a book which switches between dialogs and narration.

I tried C# recently again, after having migrated to use JS/TS and Node.Js as my main stack for years.

What put me off was how cumbersome it seemed to be. Maybe I’ve just been spoiled by JS/TS, but where are the following features (which I believe to be quite basic)? - Union types - Object literals - Functions as first class citizens

I get that C# is supposed to be a purely OO language, but in this day, the most useful languages are multi-paradigm.

People like to dish on JS/TS but IMHO one reason why they became so popular is overlooked. There’s just something so direct and unceremonious about programming in JS, and with TS you get strong expressiveness as well.

Until and unless the .NET languages have that it will be hard to pull me away.

> Union types

Yes, these are missing in C#.

> Object literals

You could use records[1], or anonymous types[2].

> Functions as first class citizens

There's delegates[3] and lambda expressions[4]. Is there anything that's missing here that you need?

You can use lambda expressions almost exactly like you might in JS/TS, even omitting the type:

  var squared = x => x * x;

And if you want even more functional, you could always use F#.

[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/language-ref...

[2]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/fundamentals...

[3]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system?view=net...

[4]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/language-ref...

> You could use records[1], or anonymous types[2].

Not quite with directness of JS.

> There's delegates[3] and lambda expressions[4].

Again you can get something equivalent, but not without some ceremony. It’s not as frictionless as with JS.

> It’s not as frictionless as with JS.

I'm not sure how much less friction you want than directly declaring lambdas, or LINQ, or any of the newer functional constructs.

Like I said, if you want more functional, there's F#, which is a dialect of ML.

I think your problem is just structural vs nominal typing, in that you can’t get away from the former.

Union types are a gap, although records and switch expressions will get you much closer than was previously possible.

Object literals are a thing, they’re called anonymous types. You just new them up. And functions can be passed around as first class objects, with some minor type boilerplate in a few places.

There are a few places where you have to adjust to different naming conventions and types are obviously stricter but my experience is that for the most part modern c# has all the things I like about TS/JS.

It is worth mentioning the c# team is taking a serious look at Union types finally. Considering the runtime already has a version in f# I'm curious how it goes on the c# side of the house (I know semantics are different between the two languages so can't necessarily be 1:1)

Poor support for 64 bits in 2023 makes me very sad whenever I .NET

Could you elaborate? Do you specifically mean support for 64-bit arrays or something?

.NET in general has great support for 64-bit platforms and while it wasn't the default target for .NET Framework, it has been the default target for .NET [Core] for years.

We notably don't support single-dimensional arrays that have a 64-bit length or individual objects in general being that large. However, that also isn't necessarily a bad thing as there is a large difference between your overall application supporting more than 32-bits of memory (decently common and generally good) and individual allocations using more than 32-bits of memory (not so common and generally not good to have).

If you're creating individual allocations that are larger than 4GB, you're likely not correctly accounting for devices that only have 4-8GB of memory, are more prone to cause memory thrashing, and may end up negatively impacting other parts of the system since such allocations place special restrictions on how the GC can/should interact with the data or in the case of data that is or contains reference types it can add large numbers of additional references for the GC to track.

For such scenarios, it's often better to manage your memory differently, to support streaming/buffering where possible, and if it is the rare scenario that actually necessitates such large allocations to use things like NativeMemory to bypass the GC alongside Span or the SequenceReader/Writer APIs to work with smaller chunks of data. This also allows the data to be thought about differently since the algorithm you'd use to work with small to medium sized data is not necessarily the same algorithm you'd want to use when working with large to huge data. The time cost required to process multiple GB of memory is significantly different after all, as is the cache locality and other aspects.

Arrays might be forgivable (although the other languages including Python, C++, and Rust are not restricted there), but Spans are less so.

At this point even my phone has 12GB of memory. Although I am more concerned about deep learning. Streaming tensors doesn't make much sense.

The other annoying bit is memory-mapped files.

Spans are certainly a bit unfortunate, and are something I wish were backed by `nint` instead of `int`. But those came to the language later and it wasn't covered as part of the initial design.

That being said, it is largely in the same boat where if you're working with more than 2GB of memory in a single allocation, you're not necessarily going to have a good time. Even if your phone has 12GB of memory, you in practice get a much smaller portion of that available for actual usage and you don't want to cap out the available RAM either since that will cause thrashing and other issues.

75-80% of available physical RAM is about what you want to cap out at, and that's if you're the only app really using any resources.

MemoryMapped files notably support 64-bit values today and have since they were introduced. As have streams in general.

Streaming tensors can make sense and is necessary with extremely large models. The CPU cannot handle all data at once and the cost of loading everything from disk is often expensive, so you'll want to balance loading in data you need in the short term with data that isn't needed anymore or will only be needed in the long term.

Streaming or otherwise chunking your data can likewise help with parallelization and while there are some domains where chunking isn't possible, streaming always is. It just comes down to data size to determine if its beneficial or not.

I want to believe.

> One can write code for almost

any

use case (except perhaps embedded) with .NET.

How so? Do you mean it doesn't support ephemeral ftrace-based tracing or something? That seems unlikely to be true given core CLR features like reflection as well as Microsoft's extensive history of embedding .NET into services and devices.

Embedded is a very barren environment. One where bytes of memory and individual clock cycles can matter a lot.

This is just not the environment a memory managed language, running atop a virtual machine runtime is suitable for. You'd have to strip all that away, and then you'd just be left with C# syntax, but it would be very far from being C# and would not be compatible with any standard C# library, framework or platform.

For a lot of embedded work, even Rust is having a difficult time getting traction. Even the C++ Standard Library doesn't fit on many of the systems folks are working on, let alone the STL.

There's embedded and then there's embedded.

The system I'm working on at my day job has about 1meg of Flash and, IIRC, 128k RAM. It was reduced in resources to save cost (disposable device). The one I'm working on at home has about 4M Flash and 256k RAM. One of them is making liberal use of the STL and I know both have Python implementations available.

Tiny, memory constrained devices are still around, but they're a smaller and smaller part of the pie every year.

You do realize Java was literally made for set top-boxes and the like? Sure, there are much more resource-constrained embedded devices as well, but byte code takes up much less space than machine code, plus a naive interpreter can be really really small, so it’s not an unworkable path.

There could be sufficiently small and performance critical things that you really need to use C/Rust and avoid the overhead of garbage collection all together, or you need deterministic timing and so can't use GC.

The performance ceiling of C# is extremely high now though, if you use the low level features. Unsafe blocks, even simd intrinsics! But at that point you aren't really doing C# so much, but at least you can dip into those features for performance critical parts of your code without having to pull out a new language and compiler and complicate your workflow and build tools.

> But at that point you aren't really doing C# so much

I wouldn't really agree on this point.

Unsafe blocks have been a feature since C# 1.0 They may not be the default way of writing C#, but they've always been a natural and integral part of C# and have extensive use internally to ensure that interop can work and extra performance is available where possible.

SIMD acceleration has likewise been a part of the BCL (standard library) for nearly 10 years now and is just as integrated behind the scenes. It being part of the formal BCL makes it even more "standard" than the equivalent in C/C++ where such functionality is relegated to compiler specific headers/extensions.

SIMD code itself is also very idiomatic C#. There is nothing really different about utilizing the APIs, the only difference is in how you think about handling your data. Needing to think differently about how data is handled for some contexts is applicable to many domains in C# (and programming in general). It's no different than making code work with async or multi-threading ;)

Simply put, all these features are still C# and I don't think its necessarily good to say that using them means you're not really writing C# anymore. I view it as a disservice to the language, its extensibility, and power. It also leaves a connotation that you might be better off writing C/C++ instead, which is often not the case.

Modern embedded is not the same as it was in our youth. Embedded platforms then were 8-bit, 1-4 MHz and 64K of RAM would be a luxury. Often that address space would be shared with ROM.

Now we take multi-core, 64-bits, gigabyte address spaces, memory protection and multi-tasking Unix-like OSs for granted most of the time. Except for the most stringent requirements (such as hard real time or very constrained power budgets) that we find small bare metal platforms.

And those are real fun to do ( but not as much fun to debug).

> How so?

I specifically left embedded out because I didn't really want to make assumptions about CLR byte code running within the constraints of such environments. I've only ever programmed in C++ on embedded devices, so I can't actually comment on CLR (ergo the perhaps in my comment).

There actually was a sort of embedded-systems variant of .NET called ".NET Micro" but it fell off a few years back (last release was back in 2015) and I think it had some high-ish minimum requirements (e.g. it's not running on a PIC or the AVR arduinos)

I wrote a blog post about .NET Micro (https://meanderingthoughts.hashnode.dev/history-of-microsoft...).

It is actually a pretty nice framework, but it does (did) require a 32bit CPU at minimum, and a hefty amount of flash.

That said, the UI framework was a joy to work with!

Oh nice! That was a good wee read, thanks!

The next post in the series, https://meanderingthoughts.hashnode.dev/history-of-microsoft... is more technical.

I should do some sort of write up of just .netMF, but I don't honestly recall too much about it in a general sense, since most of my time was spent in the weeds optimizing code.

These are great. You're a good writer and have interesting experience on some tech that the general-public had exposure to.

Thanks! Sadly my submissions to HN don't do well, I've only ever hit the front page with my launch announcement of the MS Band.

I'm terrible at clickbait titles, so I sadly don't see much hope for future articles achieving any significant level of popularity!