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Comment by le-mark | Hacker News Reader

I used to see some excitement around .net core several years ago. I haven’t heard or seen much in the wild. Is anyone using .net on systems other than windows nowadays?

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It’s huge in the game dev world, with Unity and Godot. .net also had a reasonable community on mobile for a while thanks to Xamarin, but I cannot imagine that many people using it for new mobile projects in 2026 (outside of game dev I mean).

It’s a very decent language (I mean C#) and runtime, I wish it had more market share in the startup world.

An enterprise shop I co-op'd at was porting one of their apps from Xamarin to MAUI when I worked there, but certainly it doesn't have much mindshare (if any) amongst SE undergrads at my university.

Someone I know who works with .net says that there is still no replacement for full Visual Studio for development, which is Windows only.

Rider is the replacement, unless they are doing really specific (like WinUI2/UWP)

VS Code is also manageable. Or the CLI tools, if that's your thing.

Rider is definitely the most equivalent to full Visual Studio though.

I don’t think VS Code is remotely a replacement for VS/Rider. I use VS Code for a lot of things but for large and complex project sets the automation and features in VS are luxuries you really miss. It’s like going back to the Stone Age to use VS Code in those contexts. Trying to fill the voids in VS Code with extensions makes VS Code very brittle. VS Code has its lane but I think they are different tools suited to very different jobs.

I agree but there are people out there who are productive enough without a full IDE. Or it just suits their use case.

I used to think this. Hopped to rider 4 years ago and haven't missed it except for .sqlproj development.

Unity is still using Mono these days which is missing basically all of the C# and .NET improvements from the past... 10 years now?

Godot was using Mono too but has since switched to .NET in version 4.

Still a great language and I hope Unity can hit their target to switch to .NET soon!

Damn, I assumed they had switched to .net core, I cannot believe they are still stuck on mono. Thanks for the correction

I consulted for multiple enterprise C# projects in the last 5 years. At least two of them are 1mil+ lines of code each.

All of them run in Linux servers.

Some of them were ported from PHP and Python to C#.

Plus LLMs thrive in strongly typed languages.

Which means C# will keep being very strong in enterprise too. Not only in games where it reigns a large chunk of the market share.

Yes; many (Alpine/Debian) containers in K8s on GKE for production rail ticketing infra in the UK.

There's not tons of noise being made because for the most part it all, Just Works and that's fairly boring. Perf, memory usage etc gets better every release. As an ecosystem, I'm pretty happy with it. I reach for other languages for smaller microservices.

> rail ticketing infra in the UK

You mean Raileasy? Or RDG too? (Just curious about the stack of the wider rail tech infra)

What's preventing you from using C# for smaller microservices? And what do you reach for?

Maybe startup time was a problem before AOT?

For almost 10 years now, we have not published anything .NET to the Windows platform. .NET is more performant on Linux today than Windows, and I would say development is also better there (using Rider). However, we do still have devs who prefer Windows. We have built many critical systems on .NET and they just work, so they may be boring to some of the folks who like to have more excitement from their systems.

Yes, lambda's and our dev's use mac's so it enables that. We deploy some apps to some unix based server as well but the company is mostly windows servers anyway.

Wwwuuuuuaaahhhhh! (making a big wild excited noise using asp.net core exclusively on Linux servers since 2017)

it was an obvious marketing campaign. back then core and blazor were shilled relentlessly, and the artificial excitement died the moment MS moved on to shill vscode and typescript.

companies spend a lot on marketing, and it's not just ads.

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