Its a shame, they even had a second change when Oracle bought sun and no one knew what was going to happen with Java, but fumbled that as well.
That statement was true - until 2016. Times change, Microsoft changed.
There's not a single widely distributed infra application in C# out there. When people want to build stuff like kafkas, kubernetes, consuls, they still go to Java/Go/C++.
Java is frankly a bad choice for that too these days for a new project, and for the same reason: why would you develop infrastructure in a language that requires shipping a runtime when Rust and Go exist? That made a lot more sense back when C/C++ was your only other real choice.
Meanwhile, plenty of people are in this thread telling you that they do in fact use C# to distribute cross-platform applications, but you seem to be uninterested in hearing that.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/java
https://www.microsoft.com/openjdk
https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/languages/java
Because it turns out, making Java running on Azure, on those 60% Linux workloads, is lot of money.
Also plenty of Azure, anything CNCF related, is mostly Go and Rust.
Which is kind of sad, I would expect Azure to be a good contributor for having a .NET presence in the CNCF project landscape.
C# is also fine for this, just way less popular. Recently ms put out https://github.com/microsoft/Garnet when the redis debacle happened.
The Apache project has helped put out quite a few large infra projects, most of them in Java (I don’t know why this is but assume they have lots of resources to help with that, and also that people don’t like debugging memory crashes).
Ms has just been not the greatest collaborators with their open source community. A lot of the time it seems like they want to do the initial foundation, then leave “drawing the rest of the owl” to the community, which ends with lots of partially functional things. GUI frameworks, f# tooling, drivers for commonly used critical infra. At the same time, people get upset when ms tries to build a better version of an existing open source project, so there’s no winning. They’ve just put themselves in such a poor spot.
If you try to install any of the latter, it will be apparent why. (They are poor in usability).
Azure has entered the chat.
Microsoft Orleans has entered the chat.
ASP .NET Core has entered the chat.
Ever played Halo online?
Used StackOverflow? (very likely)
Visited any website on Azure? (most likely)
Microsoft Orleans (Virtual Actor framework) powers the Halo server infrastructure since at least 2011 if not sooner, which arguably the Halo series is insanely popular, especially for online gaming. Also powers plenty of Azure itselfs own infrastructure. I've worked on dozens of scalable C# projects, and know plenty of devs from all over who have as well.
Orleans was so good, EA made their own version in Java which was extensively used there as well, though it looks to be dead, but Orleans is as alive as ever.
Not to mention plenty of Azure itself is open source, like say... Azure Functions, which run inside of ASP .NET Web Services... and are... you guessed it, C#. Plenty of services running on that platform.
https://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2018/08/22/bing-ne...
No-one's writing a database server or identity management system or source code repository or business intelligence tool or even something like a linter in cross-platform C#. Unless you're a Windows shop, it's just not a first-class ecosystem.
C# as a language has always been cross-platform.
Though the last few versions have made incredible gains in performance optimizations. You won’t get the flexibility of C++ but the performance comes close to it in most cases, when written optimally.
And you don’t have to deal with arcane, bullshit build systems with a learning curve that is worse than the language, and breaks down on every OS major version update (or its own version updates).
Not really. Like, it notionally ran on FreeBSD, but nontrivial programs never actually worked until recently, and even now they mostly still don't.
We are talking about the language, not the runtime implementation.
pkg install lang/dotnet
As a sibling comment pointed out, .NET assemblies within Nuget packages are by-definition portable, unless they use platform intrinsics without a fallback and or without using newer crossplat APIs, but this is predominantly specific to SIMD code and a rather niche case that concerns my work.
There are some Nuget packages which come packaged with native dependencies, and some of the ancient and unmaintained ones do come with like a single win-x86 .dll inside, but this is a "things you sometimes encounter with C/C++" and in general is a rare occurrence.
Nowadays, the packages that have native dependencies either simply expect the host to have them installed (like you install, say, gstreamer), or come with dependent packages per-platform (and the matrix gets quite big: [x86, x64, arm64] x [linux, osx, win]). Like https://github.com/sandrohanea/whisper.net
But then again, this has to do with a specific package and its owner, if that's what you meant.
Note that there is no culture issue, there is poor framing and a strawman one. "I had issues on a niche target" is not mutually exclusive with cross-platform. Would you say lack of support for SunOS is a damning evidence of "pro-windows agenda"? (whatever it is, I use macOS and Linux hosts mainly and surprisingly and funnily enough, there is work to support SunOS as well)
The thinly veiled "but linux/unix!" low effort replies are unfortunate and tiresome. They don't strike me as a productive attitude that seeks to make things work.
Not a specific single program (not package) just my general experience of how "find useful-sounding program written in C#" -> "download it, try to run it" usually goes. I could probably dig up the name of the most recent thing I tried it with if you really want (I think it was a video renaming tool) but there's no useful discussion to be had about what a random 1-person project happens to support or not.
> But then again, this has to do with specific package and its owner.
> Note that there is no culture issue, there is poor framing and a strawman one.
If most package owners act a certain way that's what culture is. I doubt either of us has the time to do a statistically valid survey of what's out there. Maybe your experience is different, but let me ask: are you actually using C# programs on non-Windows, and e.g. reporting bugs in them? And finding maintainers take them seriously when you do?
> Would you say lack of support for SunOS is a damning evidence of an anti-OSS culture?
I think projects that assume the whole-world is Linux and don't support e.g. FreeBSD or Illumos (I assume that's what you meant by SunOS?) are very much anti-OSS, and complain loudly about them when I encounter them, yes. Obviously there are levels of "not supported" here, but "well, your patch sounds ok so I'll merge it, can't promise we won't break FreeBSD again in the future since we don't have the resources to test it" is still better than I've gotten from most C# projects when I've tried.
What is the name of the software that you expected to run on the OS of your choice? I briefly looked through your Github profile hoping to find it but it seems it mostly consists of Scala, Java and a few other non-.NET projects. I assume you haven't had the opportunity to use .NET tooling yet. Are you interested in getting .NET SDK to run on FreeBSD?
Was "the evil" software just an ancient WinForms application?
I've used it some, not to the same extent, and generally at work - another one of those cultural differences I've found is that most JVM/etc. companies are at least theoretically on-board with open-sourcing their non-core libraries, whereas in .NET land there's much less willingness to do that. The actual tooling is good (the best I've used in some ways), but that's only one piece of the puzzle.
> Are you interested in getting .NET SDK to run on FreeBSD?
The SDK itself runs great. I'm more interested in being able to drop in a small program that solves a problem for me - like, that's the way I started with Ruby or OCaml or Go or Erlang, there was a standalone thing that I could pick up and use as part of my system, I didn't have to rearchitect everything or buy into the whole ecosystem or change my workflow. I don't even know Erlang at all, but it's running in my stack in that I'm running Riak (with the Java driver), and that gives me a place where it's already adding value and I could dip my toe further into it if I wanted. That's the thing I've never found from the .NET world - a reason to run it in my system that doesn't require me to fully buy into it to get started. (I guess in theory SQL server could be that, but it's non-opensource and doesn't have any compelling selling point over the substitutes. Part of it's honestly probably just marketing, but that goes for any new language/tool - the most persuasive thing is hearing other people having success with it in a similar situation)
> Was "the evil" software just an ancient WinForms application?
Quite possibly, but I remember command-line tools also not working - just these random one-developer tools have no reason to publish versions for other platforms, and it's not the natural workflow, so they don't. Probably the issues are minor (like, I remember one that was using some windows-only part of the standard library to do something incredibly basic like base64 decoding - I'm sure someone who uses .NET every day would take 30 seconds to swap that out with using the right part of the .NET core standard library instead. But it doesn't make for an easy onramp)
Yes, I do, but only those that I personally encounter, which almost never happens, my daily driver is macOS but .NET treats it very similarly to Linux. Linux is the most well-polished platform though. I can't actually believe we still have to have this kind of conversation in 2024. It's like talking to a street madman who keeps asking "no but is the sky blue? are you sure?". Yes, it is.
And no, it's not something you have to actively think about - just send an http request, write to a file, render a button with avalonia, etc. None of these require thinking about underlying OS. It just works.
In fact, the first version which was called back then .NET Core 1.0 was released 8 years ago, and was already cross-platform. By the time .NET Core 3.1 got released, it was battle-tested and stable, many businesses were moving their applications to linux hosts, often to containerized deployments at the time. This was about 5 years ago. A blink of an eye for enterprise, but a long time ago given the development pace.
> Obviously there are levels of "not supported" here, but "well, your patch sounds ok so I'll merge it, can't promise we won't break FreeBSD again in the future since we don't have the resources to test it" is still better than I've gotten from most C# projects when I've tried.
FreeBSD support is "well, your patch sounds ok so I'll merge it, can't promise we won't break FreeBSD again in the future since we don't have the resources to test it". There are considerations to not break community-supported platforms though.
> I think projects that assume the whole-world is Linux and don't support e.g. FreeBSD or Illumos (I assume that's what you meant by SunOS?) are very much anti-OSS, and complain loudly about them when I encounter them, yes.
I'm sure maintainers appreciate it and are grateful for this kind of attitude :)
I mean, it's the same experience for me the other way round. Every few years someone tells me "yeah, .net works properly on non-windows these days", I file that away in my head, a while later I stumble across a C# tool for something I want to do, I try to run it on my machine, and it doesn't run.
Like, I do believe it's getting better - one of the things linked in this thread actually had Linux installation instructions in the README, which is the first time I've seen that - but in most cases there's no real push or reason to move. It reminds me of the move to Python 3, which didn't really gain momentum until 3.4/3.5 when there were new features that gave an actual motivation to switch.
> In fact, the first version which was called back then .NET Core 1.0 was released 8 years ago, and was already cross-platform.
Yeah, I remember the excitement of that happening, and then the awkward realisation that no existing .NET software was compatible with it. MS pushed out SQL Server remarkably quickly, but there was never really a reason to run it (and while I don't know their nominal support status, it certainly never felt like a first-class platform) and they didn't really follow through. E.g. I don't think Visual Studio proper ever made it over?
> By the time .NET Core 3.1 got released, it was battle-tested and stable, many businesses were moving their applications to linux hosts
OK that is more interesting and promising.
> I'm sure maintainers appreciate it and are grateful for this kind of attitude :)
Meh. Linux monoculture is just as bad as Windows monoculture, the point of open-source is to make it so that people can actually modify and improve your work and use the modified versions, not to publish the code and call it a day.
> No-one's writing a database server
RavenDB, which can be run in a cluster, and uses less CPU (and I've read memory) than MongoDB itself.
There's also a recent C# based redis drop-in replacement that outperforms redis.
See more: https://github.com/quozd/awesome-dotnet?tab=readme-ov-file#d...
As for identity, you sound really silly when you consider it is literally built-in to ASP .NET itself, and can be expanded upon to your hearts desire, plus there's no shortage of available identity management libraries in C#.
As for source code repository, I'm not sure what you mean, but for years Microsoft hosted CodePlex which was essentially GitHub for C# projects. Visual Studio and C# projects are typically hosted on Git, I would be shocked if there's no web UI for git in C#, there's definitely plenty of applications for git in .NET
I'm not even going to comment on business intelligence, now you're just being very lazy. You're telling me Microsoft has 0 BI tooling and SDKs? Come on.
As for a linter, you are either trolling, or just blindly hate Microsoft for no rhyme or reason, there's more than enough linters, especially the best one of all, ReSharper, which is integrated into Rider which is a cross-platform IDE. There's also MonoDevelop, SharpDevelop, etc
I literally spent a few weeks ago porting a .NET 3.5 app I hadn't touched in years, to .NET 8 from Ubuntu Linux, and got it running, in under 30 minutes in Project Rider.
Also nearly forgot. Netflix's original web UI was Silverlight, which is C# / .NET back when it was at its peak for its time.
Ok, that actually sounds interesting. Still haven't heard of anyone using it, and closed-source makes it a non-starter, but I'm vaguely interested. Even then though, sounds like their client libraries are only .NET?
> As for identity, you sound really silly when you consider it is literally built-in to ASP .NET itself, and can be expanded upon to your hearts desire, plus there's no shortage of available identity management libraries in C#.
Sure there is plenty of support for it within the platform. My point is no-one's writing their organisational SSO system in C#, unless they're already bought into the Windows stack.
> As for source code repository, I'm not sure what you mean, but for years Microsoft hosted CodePlex which was essentially GitHub for C# projects.
I mean the equivalent of Bitbucket Server or GitLab, the thing you'd run to host your own source repos internally.
> I'm not even going to comment on business intelligence, now you're just being very lazy. You're telling me Microsoft has 0 BI tooling and SDKs?
No, I'm saying that what they have is all locked into the MS/Windows parallel world stack. There's nothing that a company that isn't committed to them would use.
> As for a linter, you are either trolling, or just blindly hate Microsoft for no rhyme or reason, there's more than enough linters, especially the best one of all, ReSharper, which is integrated into Rider which is a cross-platform IDE. There's also MonoDevelop, SharpDevelop, etc
There are plenty of linters for C#, sure. But no-one would write a general linter in it. It was an example that came to mind because that was how Facebook first started adopting OCaml - a linter is a small standalone tool, so it's an ok place to experiment with a new technology stack.
> Netflix's original web UI was Silverlight, which is C# / .NET back when it was at its peak for its time.
And look how that worked out for them.
Worked out pretty well to be fair, their old UI actually worked perfectly on Linux via Moonlight. Moonlight was more usable than Flash on Linux which was an unstable mess.
> There are plenty of linters for C#, sure. But no-one would write a general linter in it. It was an example that came to mind because that was how Facebook first started adopting OCaml - a linter is a small standalone tool, so it's an ok place to experiment with a new technology stack.
Except ReSharper lints for other things too.
> I mean the equivalent of Bitbucket Server or GitLab, the thing you'd run to host your own source repos internally.
That was CodePlex, there's also Azure DevOps? Which does all the things BitBucket and GitLab do and probably more? It is arguably poorly named in my view, since I've heard managers confuse "DevOps" and "Azure DevOps" by using the term interchangeably.
Up to a point - it lints the things you might need in a C# application. But it's very much a tool for the MS/Windows/C# vertical - even using it in Rider isn't really their focus. If JetBrains was building the linter they used for all IDEA-family IDEs in C#, that would be interesting.
> Azure DevOps
Right, that's the kind of thing I'm talking about. Is anyone using that who's not already bought into MS/Windows/C#, is that a market they sell to at all? Can you even run it on anything other than Windows? It sounds like not, which rather proves the point.
"microsoft didn't really care much about building a community or getting it to work natively in other OSes/toolchains" still rings true IMO. C# has some great stuff if you're fully onboard with the MS stack, but they've taken at most baby steps towards fitting into other environments. (If anything it feels like they expect the rest of the world to fit in with them - if you want to bring e.g. Postgres into your MS/Windows/C# world that's relatively well supported, but going the other direction is much less so)
Moreover, the ecosystem mainly gravitates to Roslyn analyzers which run within build system and, naturally, integrate with Roslyn LSP. They work regardless of IDE or text editor you choose.
In fact, quite a lot of them come out of box, with the basic set enabled by default to prevent you from obvious mistakes, automatically fixing code to use terser syntax or avoiding footguns when using low-level APIs where applicable, and a lot more opt-in for a specific scenario or a workload.
If you’ve used Wi-Fi in a hotel it’s very likely you’ve used a C# app. Is that “infra” and “widely distributed” enough?
Also .NET has been about "run everywhere on any platform" as their tagline for quite a few years now.
They have had plenty of community fumbles without question. I can't speak to those though. I've seen lots of vocal high up Microsoft employees try to win those fights on the side of the community but no idea what happens internally.
A very common modern setup is PostgreSQL, C#/.NET, Linux & using JetBrains Rider for the IDE
.NET is a highly underrated platform for backend; it always puzzles me when teams think about moving from TypeScript to Rust or Go instead of C# because it seems a much smaller leap from TypeScript.
I guess the grass is always greener somewhere
pkg install lang/dotnet