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Comment by pansa2 | Hacker News Reader

2MB for a standalone “Hello World” binary in C# is a similar size to one in Go. Do both languages produce similar-sized binaries for larger projects as well?

If so, would C# be a good choice for writing cross-platform command-line applications?

It seems that C# can produce easily-distributable binaries, while also hitting a sweet-spot in language design - not super complex like C++ or Rust, and also not overly simplistic like C or Go.

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yes its great good for cross-platform cmdline apps, i would recommend using Cocona https://github.com/mayuki/Cocona

Aside from syntax preferences, why and when would one choose Go over C#?

You don't. Production ready statically compiled native C# is a death sentence for Golang :)

When Go first came out, it was better than C# in terms of support for concurrency, stand-alone binaries, and cross-platform. It seems that C# has done a lot of catching up since then, though.

I have not begun really using Go in earnest yet, but at least in the cloud engineering world it seems to be the language of choice (along with Python) due to the ease of using its concurrency capabilities

Because it was made to run on Linux from the start. I remember being excited to work with .net core on Linux, then discovering that most of the system libraries for network programming and related were either not implemented or badly working, but you would only find out if dug deep into low level stuff. After that, I swore of using it seeing how much the hype for cross platform didn't match reality. Hopefully they fixed it, but seeing as there are other choices of languages, it wasn't so bad.

From my experience golang uses less memory than a .net app.

I haven’t done a recent comparison so if someone had tested this lately and has different results I’d love to see it.

When C# is AOT compiled, the memory footprint is roughly the same.

Do you have any resources?

I was looking for similar benchmarks but couldn't find anything conclusive. I found the benchmark game [1] but only had .net 7 AoT (not .net 8) benchmarks and memory consumption seems too high.

I'd ditch golang on a pinch as soon as I can use a decent type system, and C# seems like a great alternative.

Crystal would be my ideal but its compiler is still too slow, sadly.

[1] https://programming-language-benchmarks.vercel.app/csharp-vs...

Do you have any reference for this?

I'm very curious to see how they managed to pull this off since from my knowledge of the development patterns, .net has historically been much more allocation-heavy (not that it isn't very efficient with allocated data).

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