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Comment by nkozyra | Hacker News Reader

It still has some platform dependency that Mono or .Net Core doesn't fully solve.

It's a very pleasant language to work in, especially compared to Java, but there are so many other really nice C adjacent languages in the field that it's hard to argue for if you're not in that ecosystem.

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I think that might have been the case a while ago but they have even dropped .net-core and it's now just .net and cross platform.

It appears to have been the case since .net 5 (2020) (I've also stopped paying attention to MS a bit before then).

"Yes, .NET 5 is cross-platform and can be installed on Linux, Mac, and Windows. It aims to provide a consistent development experience across platforms by unifying different .NET flavors, including .NET Core, .NET Framework, .NET Standard, and Mono. .NET 5 also aligns all frameworks to support a common set of APIs, making it easier to build cross-platform libraries."

Yeah but the way they've done it, iirc, is by cutting libraries out of Core that really should be in there. I remember looking recently at some pretty basic stuff that broke in 6, simply because for some reason the relevant APIs (which were pretty low-level and not really related to anything driver-specific) were marked as Windows-only and ripped out of Core and Host packages.

So in theory it's all independent but in practice the best bits are still on Windows.

This was my experience trying to rewrite a service about a year ago.

It has been amusing watching them try to get cross platform going, I used to hear how they (c#/.net) did such a good job with backwards compatibility, however Java had been doing crazier platforms for longer and their cross platform/backwards compat is in a much better state... although they are much more difficult to use to integrate deeply with a system.

What stuff was that?

And C# is the nicest of them (because other options are worse in one aspect or another, especially performance).

There are many metrics by which C# is the nicest language, but after 10+ years of doing (and loving) C# development, I find that I prefer Dart as a C#-like language these days.

What dependencies/limitations are that?

The biggest one I've run into is GDI support (Graphics Device Interface). This covers things like two-dimensional vector graphics, imaging, and typography. So simple things like transforming or drawing images are no longer supported.

There are decent third party open-source libaries like SixLabors/ImageSharp that have stared to fill the gap.

System.Drawing was always just a wrapper for GDI(+), and you CAN use it on Linux via using System.Drawing.Common which is a wrapper for GDI+ (Windows) or something else like libgdi+ on non-windows. It works - but it feels more like a compat hack than anything else. System.Drawing wouldn't look the way it does if it wasn't designed to be a Windows only API around GDI+. ImageSharp was always a good lib but now the license was murdered. Hopefully a true OSS fork will come along. SkiaSharp is also a good alternative, especially if you also need the drawing bits.

Missing a Graphics Library in .NET (5-8) is just half the story. It's of course missing an entire UI library too. But Microsoft, perhaps wisely, chose not to also implement a whole xplat UI library. Avalonia/Uno/etc are already there.

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