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Comment by amne | Hacker News Reader

This right here is peak Microsoft:

  set DOTNET_GCName=clrgc.dll
  set COMPlus_GCPath=ManagedDotnetGC.dll

Good luck understanding this when you come back 2 months later.

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Every mature programming language ecosystem has quirks that only those that were around since the early days get why they are there.

It was my understanding the ridiculous and historic COMPlus name had been replaced with just DOTNET several years ago.

Deeper horror:

> I got closer to the goal when I realized an interesting quirk: .NET supports environment variables prefixed by either DOTNET_ or COMPlus_, whereas NativeAOT only supports DOTNET_. So if we set COMPlus_GCName=ManagedDotnetGC.dll, only the .NET runtime will pick it up, and the NativeAOT runtime will ignore it.

It is rather hard to name environment variables as COM+.

So why wasn’t it named DOTNET? My point is that the COMPlus name was about 10 years out of date after Core.

Most likely because it predates it, COM+ Runtime is on the genesis of .NET, originally designed with J++ in mind, and backwards compatibility.

For example,

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/msdn-magazine/2001...

Just write a batch file? I don't see the issue

Explain what these lines do and why they're necessary, then you'll understand the problem

They are environment variables specifying DLLs to use.

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