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Yep, the CLR/VM is a much better target for languages and C# fixes a lot of Java's mistakes. It's such a shame that Microsoft until recently kept it so tightly

by dtech 9y ago

Yep, the CLR/VM is a much better target for languages and C# fixes a lot of Java's mistakes. It's such a shame that Microsoft until recently kept it so tightly controlled and Windows only. If that hadn't been the case the ecosystem (libraries and languages) might have been a lot more up to par when compared to the JVM ecosystem.

rbanffy 9y ago
> kept it so tightly controlled and Windows only Make no mistake: Microsoft knows very well what its business model is. Sun was very confused in that respect.
0xbear 9y ago
It never was "Windows only": https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc749640.aspx https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc749640.aspx. Mono arrived shortly thereafter. And it had open spec right from the start. Patents were an issue though, there's no disagreement on that point.
- deong 9y ago
  Mono was awesome for what it was, and I'm not trying to denigrate those early efforts, but what it was wasn't really enough to say .Net wasn't Windows only. It didn't support WinForms, so no GUI application built for Windows would work on Mono without a major rewrite. Performance was also pretty bad in my experience. We built an optimization engine while I was in grad school for a funding source that mandated Windows, so we wrote the application in C#/.Net. I would develop on Linux at the time, and I built a version of the application that had no GUI so it could run under Mono, but it was easily an order of magnitude slower. It kind of worked for a small slice of .Net programs (e.g., those that didn't rely on WinForms or any other non-implemented part of the stack). That's about all you could say for it for quite some time.
  - cratermoon 9y ago
    Mono was great for the kind of programs you would write in Python if you worked for a company that used any F/OSS under protest and held it at arms length when it couldn't avoid using it.

by dtech 9y ago

rbanffy 9y ago

> kept it so tightly controlled and Windows only Make no mistake: Microsoft knows very well what its business model is. Sun was very confused in that respect.

0xbear 9y ago

It never was "Windows only": https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc749640.aspx https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc749640.aspx. Mono arrived shortly thereafter. And it had open spec right from the start. Patents were an issue though, there's no disagreement on that point.

deong 9y ago
Mono was awesome for what it was, and I'm not trying to denigrate those early efforts, but what it was wasn't really enough to say .Net wasn't Windows only. It didn't support WinForms, so no GUI application built for Windows would work on Mono without a major rewrite. Performance was also pretty bad in my experience. We built an optimization engine while I was in grad school for a funding source that mandated Windows, so we wrote the application in C#/.Net. I would develop on Linux at the time, and I built a version of the application that had no GUI so it could run under Mono, but it was easily an order of magnitude slower. It kind of worked for a small slice of .Net programs (e.g., those that didn't rely on WinForms or any other non-implemented part of the stack). That's about all you could say for it for quite some time.
- cratermoon 9y ago
  Mono was great for the kind of programs you would write in Python if you worked for a company that used any F/OSS under protest and held it at arms length when it couldn't avoid using it.