Hacker News Reader

Comment by zigzag312 | Hacker News Reader

I agree, .NET Standard limitation unnecessarily complicates development experience. I think it's because some tools (Visual Studio) is still use legacy .NET Framework. I don't understand why they didn't integrate them via out of process architecture into these tools, since source generators didn't exist in the legacy framework anyway.

I sometimes generate code from plain CLI projects (avoiding source generators altogether), as whole debugging and DX is so much better.

View on HN

Yeah, I went with that approach for most of the code generation in the emulator I'm currently working on. Source generators handle a few core things, but more advanced compilation tasks went to just ahead of time generation; couldn't get my parser combinator library to play nicely with .NET Standard, so that was just a dead-end.

You add PolySharp to your source generator project to get back some of the modern C# features. https://github.com/Sergio0694/PolySharp

.NET standard isn’t the biggest issue with making source generators. You can’t add dependencies to your project, which is an absolutely huge oversight IMO.

You can add dependencies, it's just important, that you also add the dependencies to the project where the source generator is used:

SourceGenerator.csproj:

  <ProjectReference Include="..\Dependency.csproj" />

FinalProject.csproj:

  <ProjectReference Include="..\Dependency.csproj" OutputItemType="Analyzer" ReferenceOutputAssembly="false" />
  <ProjectReference Include="..\SourceGenerator.csproj" OutputItemType="Analyzer" ReferenceOutputAssembly="false" />

And I also recommend to add "<LangVersion>latest</LangVersion>" to SourceGenerator.csproj to use new features like raw string literals.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com