The same is even better with Java.
It's common to find Java binaries build 20 Years+ to run on present day systems without issue.
It's common to find Java binaries build 20 Years+ to run on present day systems without issue.
Java: no bonus work induced by third parties to keep projects alive, keeps working for a long time. Would recommend.
FWIW, over the last couple of years the stability story has got hugely better, thanks largely to the efforts of the Haskell Foundation Stability Working Group.
You can see the breakage inventories that I've produced for the last few GHC releases, and see that the amount of breaking changes is decreasing rapidly:
Back in 2021 I ported a small C program I wrote into Rust as part of learning the language. Since I was inexperienced even though it's small and Unix specific I added about two dozen dependencies including transitively a Windows API dependency via somebody's terminal lib.
So, that's a 2018 Edition Rust program, untouched since November 2021.
The binary of course still runs just the same as ever, I've used it a few times over the intervening years - but we'll take that as read. Lets go into the source code and build it again today, how much work will it be to get Rust source code working years later with a brand new Rust toolchain and different OS?
It just works. Not like "Well, I had to run some updates and modernisations" it just works.
I've seen plenty of Java projects that don't work on anything more recent than JDK in the enterprise space (typically large Spring systems, not even Spring Boot, also DB drivers and pooling solutions seem to be quite brittle in that regard), though I will say more or less the same about old .NET codebases (before Core was a thing), old PHP, Node.js and so on.
Most of the time, it comes down to complex dependencies.
Both languages are very impressive and benefit from the competition.
This changed around 2014-ish, as a result C# has been really stable for a decade.
Really, though, I'm very happy there is competition in the GC enterprise languages for linux. Regardless of who is "better", the competition will continue to drive progress in this area.
It works since most new C# features are just syntactic sugar which is lowered by the compiler.
Some of them require new types in the BCL (e.g. Range/Index, marker types for required/init/records), but for that you can just reference PolySharp which will generate the missing types on the fly.
Features that will not work typically also need runtime support, so default interface methods, static interfaces and the like will not work.
All of those are also part of .NET ecosystem.
Agree with the competition remark, hence why my toolbox has been .NET, Java, JavaScript ecosystems on the first drawer for decades now.
What I can say (MS hesitance aside) is that it is excellent for web applications where the ability to sustainably bear complexity of business logic is critical to business success.
I only really saw that concern in the java ecosystem, and I am very happy .NET exists, if for no other reason than to force java to get better. Many ancillary tools (source generators, xml code generation, integration of compliance metrics) that are only ever found in java are already present and even better in the .NET world.