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I no longer do windows development, but I miss it. It's strengths are greater than you portray. The C# / .NET libraries are really beautiful and well thought o

I no longer do windows development, but I miss it. It's strengths are greater than you portray. The C# / .NET libraries are really beautiful and well thought out. I most often program in Python, and while the Python language is more concise and elegant than C#, the Python libraries are not nearly as well organized and consistent as C# / .NET. Java libraries are better than Python but worse than C#, and the Java language is worse than both C# and Python. As far as dev enivronments, Visual Studio is far better than Eclipse and roughly equal to Python's PyCharm. Because C# is compiled, it's far more performant than Python and a bit better than Java. The downside of course, is that once you start down that road, you are pretty locked into the MS world. If I was starting a new project, and I was a scrappy startup, I'd probably go with Python. But if I had resources (ie $$$) to support MS licenses and performance actually mattered, I'd go with MS. Side projects for experimentation may lead to node or rust. But sorry Java, can't really imagine a scenario where I'd start with you.

james-mcelwain 7y ago
Is C# more performant than Java? It was my understanding that HotSpot's JIT performs significantly more optimizations, almost bordering on esoteric magic, compared to the CLR. I can understand how value types would help a lot, but it is possible to optimize Java to avoid object headers on the heap at great pain, i.e. avoiding classes and doing index arithmetic on flat arrays of values. Value types coming to the JVM will obviously help here. Curious to hear about other advantages the CLR has.
scarface74 7y ago
I was an exclusive Microsoft developer for a little over 20 years. It wasn’t until I started doing cloud deployments - like the original poster implied - that I started avoiding Windows as often as I could. Once you add Windows to the mix, everything gets worse - startup time, resource requirements, automation, snd costs. Luckily, you can do C# without having to use Windows with .Net Core.
- brianpgordon 7y ago
  Ooh, you may be the perfect person to ask a question that I've been wondering about. Is .NET Core on Linux viable yet for serious use? I've done some tinkering with it and gotten a project working on MacOS but I did the development in Visual Studio on Windows. Is it realistic to do your development in Rider, with the open source version of msbuild for CI, and have it perform reasonably on Linux in production, without ever paying Microsoft anything?
  - scarface74 7y ago
    My “Linux deployments” with C# have been Docker and Nginx with Fargate (AWS Serverless Docker) [1] and Lambda. I haven’t had to worry about performance, stability, or scalability. With either technology, you get scalability for free and with Fargate you don’t have to worry about cold starts. I develop on Windows with Visual Studio and deploy to “Linux”. We use CodeBuild to compile and create the zip file (lambda) or Docker Container (Fargate). CodeBuild basically is “Serverless builds”. It launches s prebuilt or custom Docker Container and you just run .net core “publish” command line and it gets all of your Nuget packages and then you run your standard packaging commands. But Rider should be good. I’m a huge fan of R# and you can cross target Linux, Mac and Windows from either host using msbuild.
  - throwaway8941 7y ago
    The kind of development we do probably wouldn't count as "serious" here on HN, but since the other comment didn't really answer your question, I'll pitch in. We've been developing using .NET Core/Linux/Rider for the past two years. It's been pretty great. Once you get to know the IDE really well, I'd say Rider beats VS in terms of functionality and usability. .NET Core was developed with CLI usage in mind and common operations (like migrations/boilerplate generation) can be driven from CLI or Rider, you don't need VS for that. You may have some problems with 3rd-party libraries. Not all of them have been ported to .NET Standard. I'd recommend checking your project's dependencies in advance. (We did have some problems with legacy COM-based cryptographic libraries and had to build a separate "microservice" hosted under Windows to offload this stuff to. COM stuff works fine under .NET Core, but only under Windows (obviously).)
brianpgordon 7y ago
I share your high regard for C# and the .NET libraries but not your disdain for Java. Java the programming language is pretty ugly but the JVM is robust and there are other languages which compile down to Java bytecode. In your "scrappy startup" scenario I would pick Scala or Clojure long before Python, mainly because I'm skeptical of the idea of using a dynamically typed programming language for large-scale backend development - for human scalability reasons, not performance ones. Personally I'd also have to pass on Windows even in the AAA bigcorp scenario, because I prefer the tooling and open ecosystem around Linux and epoll isn't that much worse than IOCP.
- dfinninger 7y ago
  Python supports gradual typing now, and it's made the experience for me much more manageable. Lots of good IDE integration too. It's not a replacement for Java's or Go's (etc...) type system, but it really increases the amount of Python you can support given the human scalability constraints.

james-mcelwain 7y ago

Is C# more performant than Java? It was my understanding that HotSpot's JIT performs significantly more optimizations, almost bordering on esoteric magic, compared to the CLR. I can understand how value types would help a lot, but it is possible to optimize Java to avoid object headers on the heap at great pain, i.e. avoiding classes and doing index arithmetic on flat arrays of values. Value types coming to the JVM will obviously help here. Curious to hear about other advantages the CLR has.

scarface74 7y ago

I was an exclusive Microsoft developer for a little over 20 years. It wasn’t until I started doing cloud deployments - like the original poster implied - that I started avoiding Windows as often as I could. Once you add Windows to the mix, everything gets worse - startup time, resource requirements, automation, snd costs. Luckily, you can do C# without having to use Windows with .Net Core.

brianpgordon 7y ago
Ooh, you may be the perfect person to ask a question that I've been wondering about. Is .NET Core on Linux viable yet for serious use? I've done some tinkering with it and gotten a project working on MacOS but I did the development in Visual Studio on Windows. Is it realistic to do your development in Rider, with the open source version of msbuild for CI, and have it perform reasonably on Linux in production, without ever paying Microsoft anything?
- scarface74 7y ago
  My “Linux deployments” with C# have been Docker and Nginx with Fargate (AWS Serverless Docker) [1] and Lambda. I haven’t had to worry about performance, stability, or scalability. With either technology, you get scalability for free and with Fargate you don’t have to worry about cold starts. I develop on Windows with Visual Studio and deploy to “Linux”. We use CodeBuild to compile and create the zip file (lambda) or Docker Container (Fargate). CodeBuild basically is “Serverless builds”. It launches s prebuilt or custom Docker Container and you just run .net core “publish” command line and it gets all of your Nuget packages and then you run your standard packaging commands. But Rider should be good. I’m a huge fan of R# and you can cross target Linux, Mac and Windows from either host using msbuild.
- throwaway8941 7y ago
  The kind of development we do probably wouldn't count as "serious" here on HN, but since the other comment didn't really answer your question, I'll pitch in. We've been developing using .NET Core/Linux/Rider for the past two years. It's been pretty great. Once you get to know the IDE really well, I'd say Rider beats VS in terms of functionality and usability. .NET Core was developed with CLI usage in mind and common operations (like migrations/boilerplate generation) can be driven from CLI or Rider, you don't need VS for that. You may have some problems with 3rd-party libraries. Not all of them have been ported to .NET Standard. I'd recommend checking your project's dependencies in advance. (We did have some problems with legacy COM-based cryptographic libraries and had to build a separate "microservice" hosted under Windows to offload this stuff to. COM stuff works fine under .NET Core, but only under Windows (obviously).)

brianpgordon 7y ago

I share your high regard for C# and the .NET libraries but not your disdain for Java. Java the programming language is pretty ugly but the JVM is robust and there are other languages which compile down to Java bytecode. In your "scrappy startup" scenario I would pick Scala or Clojure long before Python, mainly because I'm skeptical of the idea of using a dynamically typed programming language for large-scale backend development - for human scalability reasons, not performance ones. Personally I'd also have to pass on Windows even in the AAA bigcorp scenario, because I prefer the tooling and open ecosystem around Linux and epoll isn't that much worse than IOCP.

dfinninger 7y ago
Python supports gradual typing now, and it's made the experience for me much more manageable. Lots of good IDE integration too. It's not a replacement for Java's or Go's (etc...) type system, but it really increases the amount of Python you can support given the human scalability constraints.