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Comment by spicyj | Hacker News Reader

> And C# is on its last legs as well as a desktop development tool, except in large organizations...

What's used instead?

We went back to C++ because C# just isn't supported on Linux well, and Windows is losing its once dominant position. If C# worked on iOS and Linux equivalently to Windows, then I probably would have stuck with it.

But now I do JavaScript + WebGL (which is admittedly slower than both C#, Java and C++): http://clara.io

I guess JavaScript moves pretty slow these days.

JavaScript moves really fast these days. Faster JITs, NodeJS, Asm.js, wide support for WebGL, WebCL on the horizon...

The only real downsides are scaling issues that npm is running into, the fact that Google moved much of its V8 team to Dart, and no WebGL on iOS.

The purpose of Asm.js is to only touch JS with a 10-feet pole.

Node.js is just an implementation of the Reactor pattern with some package management.

Google are smart people, they understand that dynamic weakly typed language is a dead end, hence Dart for client and Go for server.

The JavaScript engines move really fast but not the language itself.

>If C# worked on iOS and Linux

https://xamarin.com/ imho a much better alternative to C++. I really like C# as a language, it's got that general purpose excellence, but when you get on with things like LINQ,Rx,TPL it's very hard to go back to a language without such first class citizen frameworks.

It probably depends on the market and use case. I suspect LOB software is mostly web based these days (easier to deploy, upgrade, and maintain). A lot of desktop software is still written in C/C++ for Win32. Although Microsoft would probably love it if developers starting coding to WinRT which, I think, works best with C#.

And yet we get consulting projects to port stuff from MFC/C++ into WPF/C#.

I presume your customer's websites don't end with ".io" and they are actual profitable businesses?

Nope. It happened twice last year.

Projects in the chemical industry, desktop software to control the manufacturing machines and process result datasets.

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