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Comment by dgellow | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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.

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