5 ms·

100% agreed. This was a very poor article. They've basically gone with an overly expensive Microsoft stack which meant that from the beginning they were fighti

100% agreed. This was a very poor article. They've basically gone with an overly expensive Microsoft stack which meant that from the beginning they were fighting the wrong fight. Instead of thinking about scale for best performance, they had to think about best cost for minimum scale. Furthermore they decided to bastardise their C# code to some fake low level untestable C dragon code which makes matters even worse. They have created a huge mess which is probably extremely hard to maintain and too precious to touch for a performance gain which probably still only scratches on the surface of what a true low level language could have achieved. The best practice would have been to build the parts which matter most in a language which allows them to be blazingly fast and write nice testable and easy to understand code. Something like Rust or Go. But no, they stuck with C# for god knows what reason (maybe financial Microsoft incentives who knows?) and had to throw away every sensible coding practise in order to make it work. This is literally a blog post describing how not to run a large scale website.

shalmanese 6y ago
> But no, they stuck with C# for god knows what reason Mainly because Rust (2010) and Go (2009) weren't around when SO was first created (2008).
kcartlidge 6y ago
> The best practice would have been to build the parts which matter most in a language which allows them to be blazingly fast and write nice testable and easy to understand code. Something like Rust or Go. But no, they stuck with C# for god knows what reason Whilst for work I've done approaching two decades of C#, for my own stuff I have largely used Go for years now so I'm far from an MS apologist, but that impression of C# is wrong. To be fair, the article leads partly to your conclusion so that's understandable. C# with .Net Core, almost by design and by default, massively encourages "nice testable and easy to understand code" - much more so than most languages out there. And unless the codebase is a hacked together monstrosity of the type that can be created using any ecosystem, .Net Core and C# are massively performant (pre-Core .Net was just about up there with some competitors but Core is in another league over the old Framework). It's a shame that it doesn't have the mindshare outside of enterprise that it deserves, as C# on .Net Core basically gives you (practically, not syntactically) type-safe Node in terms of async/await, Go-like performance, Java-like power, and Ruby-like simplicity. Though to be honest it can take a fair while to advance from "hello world" given the atrocious naming and versioning mistakes Microsoft have made and how that impacts documentation and research.
- dustinmoris 6y ago
  > Go-like performance, Java-like power, and Ruby-like simplicity You massively overestimate C#. Microsoft devdiv marketing is working.
  - kcartlidge 6y ago
    > You massively overestimate C#. Microsoft devdiv marketing is working. No, I don't. And it isn't based on marketing. I've done C# since around 2001 and Go since around 2015 (in both cases tools, sites, and APIs) so my perspective on relative performance is from first-hand knowledge. As regards Java I don't think the comparison is controversial, and I've done Ruby (and some Rails) on and off for many years and whilst some of it may be down to familiarity, I still find C# (after acclimatising to the .Net/Core Framework) to be equally readable, flexible, and simple. You're totally free to disagree of course, I'm just taking the opportunity to correct the impression that I'm "overestimating" C# based on marketing when in reality there's no estimation happening at all - I'm speaking from personal experience.
fomine3 6y ago
C# is one of the best choice at the time (and still). Adopting Windows at the time is trade off.
- dustinmoris 6y ago
  If that’s true why has nobody (who isn’t Microsoft) ever build anything large scale in C# before or after StackOverflow?
  - detaro 6y ago
    What gives you the idea that that's remotely true?

shalmanese 6y ago

> But no, they stuck with C# for god knows what reason Mainly because Rust (2010) and Go (2009) weren't around when SO was first created (2008).

kcartlidge 6y ago

> The best practice would have been to build the parts which matter most in a language which allows them to be blazingly fast and write nice testable and easy to understand code. Something like Rust or Go. But no, they stuck with C# for god knows what reason Whilst for work I've done approaching two decades of C#, for my own stuff I have largely used Go for years now so I'm far from an MS apologist, but that impression of C# is wrong. To be fair, the article leads partly to your conclusion so that's understandable. C# with .Net Core, almost by design and by default, massively encourages "nice testable and easy to understand code" - much more so than most languages out there. And unless the codebase is a hacked together monstrosity of the type that can be created using any ecosystem, .Net Core and C# are massively performant (pre-Core .Net was just about up there with some competitors but Core is in another league over the old Framework). It's a shame that it doesn't have the mindshare outside of enterprise that it deserves, as C# on .Net Core basically gives you (practically, not syntactically) type-safe Node in terms of async/await, Go-like performance, Java-like power, and Ruby-like simplicity. Though to be honest it can take a fair while to advance from "hello world" given the atrocious naming and versioning mistakes Microsoft have made and how that impacts documentation and research.

dustinmoris 6y ago
> Go-like performance, Java-like power, and Ruby-like simplicity You massively overestimate C#. Microsoft devdiv marketing is working.
- kcartlidge 6y ago
  > You massively overestimate C#. Microsoft devdiv marketing is working. No, I don't. And it isn't based on marketing. I've done C# since around 2001 and Go since around 2015 (in both cases tools, sites, and APIs) so my perspective on relative performance is from first-hand knowledge. As regards Java I don't think the comparison is controversial, and I've done Ruby (and some Rails) on and off for many years and whilst some of it may be down to familiarity, I still find C# (after acclimatising to the .Net/Core Framework) to be equally readable, flexible, and simple. You're totally free to disagree of course, I'm just taking the opportunity to correct the impression that I'm "overestimating" C# based on marketing when in reality there's no estimation happening at all - I'm speaking from personal experience.

fomine3 6y ago

C# is one of the best choice at the time (and still). Adopting Windows at the time is trade off.

dustinmoris 6y ago
If that’s true why has nobody (who isn’t Microsoft) ever build anything large scale in C# before or after StackOverflow?
- detaro 6y ago
  What gives you the idea that that's remotely true?