7 ms·

“C#, it’s just not portable”

94 points by DonnyV 15y ago

drivebyacct2 15y ago
You might be able to write C# and target different platforms, but I've yet to be convinced that a codebase can be shared across platforms as easily as some other languages/platforms.
- DrJokepu 15y ago
  We run non-trivial, large, unmodified .NET 4 C# ASP.NET MVC web apps (compiled on Windows) on Mac Mini Servers on OS X with Mono and Apache. Never had a single problem. It's almost creepy how well it works.
  - zwp 15y ago
    That's interesting. Why do you do this?
    - DrJokepu 15y ago
      Well, it's complicated, but the main reason is that since our premises are just around the corner from one of the biggest Apple Stores in the world, we can replace any of our servers literally within minutes if they fail. This makes me sleep a lot easier at night. Also the savings on the electricity bill are not negligeable either.
      - cschep 15y ago
        You could still run windows server on those though..?
        DrJokepu 15y ago
        I could (and indeed that was what we were originally planning when we decided to go with Mac Mini Servers), but I simply don't need to. I open the packaging, put Mono on it and it's ready for work. Why would I waste time with Windows Server if it's not needed?
      - traskjd 15y ago
        >> our premises are just around the corner from one of the biggest Apple Stores in the world, we can replace any of our servers literally within minutes if they fail I sure hope you don't have a server failure outside of business hours :-)
        DrJokepu 15y ago
        I think we're prepared for that too. First, we have a few currently unused previous generation Mac Minis lying around that could be used temporarily. Second, since everything we need (Apache and PostgreSQL, minus Mono) comes preinstalled with OS X Server, these machines can easily take over each other's tasks temporarily, e.g. the database server can become a web server too until we can get a replacement. It's not ideal but it'd do during off-peak hours. Fortunately, the Apple Store is open even on Sundays so even in the worst case scenario we could get a replacement within 12 hours max, which is not necessarily the case with, say for example, Dell servers.
jinushaun 15y ago
Interesting. I always thought the Vita was running Android since it supports Android apps.
- seanalltogether 15y ago
  Are you sure about this. Reading their press release leads me to believe it's the other way around, that by developing for the Vita SDK, you can cross compile to Android if you choose. Supporting C# as the programming language, PS Suite SDK can run programs developed in C# on virtual machine equipped on both PS Certified devices and PS Vita. By supporting development for multiple devices and by adopting libraries to create a variety of content not only limited to games, PS Suite SDK will not only help developers save their cost in creating new content but also allow them to efficiently create their content on one SDK and without having to create on several different SDKs. Through PS Suite SDK, SCE will provide to game developers and publishers the potential to further expand their business opportunities to Android based portable devices. http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/sony-computer-entertainment-to-offer-software-development-kit-for-playstationsuite-starting-this-november-129854503.html http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/sony-computer-entert...
jcromartie 15y ago
Just like most languages, you can take some subset of C# and run it in many places. And, like most languages, there is some corner of the language that doesn't work on one platform or another. And most importantly, just like most languages, you end up depending on various libraries which may or may not be tied to hardware which makes significant parts of non-trivial applications non-portable. People don't make games in C# because it's C#. They make games using C# and XNA, or Unity, or some other framework. They don't make web apps in C#, but rather in (whatever flavor of) ASP.NET. And it turns out that these frameworks are the important bits. So when you choose to write something in C#, you are probably going to be choosing a framework that ties you down to a platform, and that's where the cross-platform nature of the language kind of becomes irrelevant. That's my experience, at least. If Clojure takes off on other runtimes, it will have this issue too. The JVM is it's "home" platform, and most Clojure software depends on JVM libraries, like how the vast majority of the C# software written thus far depends on Microsoft (and therefore Windows) libraries.
- berntb 15y ago
  >>If Clojure takes off on other runtimes, it will have this issue too. The JVM is it's "home" platform, and most Clojure software depends on JVM libraries, like how the vast majority of the C# software written thus far depends on Microsoft (and therefore Windows) libraries. There is a small difference. The Clojure/JVM runtime is ported to quite a lot of operating systems, where it runs quite well.
evilduck 15y ago
You can use C# everywhere, but in practice it just seems like a huge effort to avoid learning a new language to me. I have nothing against the language (writing C# is half of my day job), but all of these bridges are second-class citizens and built and maintained at the mercy of third parties just to interface with your target platform. Apple will never release updates for MonoMac or MonoTouch. Google isn't going to release C# Android SDKs or documentation. Mono for Linux always trails the Windows version and has significant community resistance, and Microsoft isn't going to integrate and maintain these bridges. You're also always losing something in the translation too, be it idiomatic style of the target API or C#, or being totally cut off from new native features, or severely restricting what community support or documentation is available to you. Any way you cut it, it's a second class experience. Worse, some of the bridges aren't free. You get to pay $400 for the privilege of not learning a little bit of Java or ObjC to get MonoTouch for Android or iOS. C# is good, but it's not so good that I refuse to learn other tools.
- stonemetal 15y ago
  While I fully agree with the losing something in translation. I don't agree that people are trying to skip learning things. It is a do I want to do 100% of my software development 3 times because I need a java version for one platform, Objective-C for the second and C# for the third. Oddly enough it seems like C++ is the only language all three platforms support natively.
  - evilduck 15y ago
    Mono for iOS and Android and MonoMac for OSX all have different API calls for their respective platforms. GTK# is its own thing too. You might avoid a total rewrite from scratch, but the UI is going to need significant tailoring to each platform still. And it's not like Java, ObjC, and C# are radically different from one another. Does keeping C# as a constant really solve this problem? (I honestly don't know, I've never done a multiplatform product like this)
    - kitsune_ 15y ago
peterknego 15y ago
You could make the same argument about C, which exists on much more platforms than C#. But writing in C does not make a program portable. Neither does writing it in C#. So yes, C# compiler might be portable, but programs written in C# are not. So yes, C# compiler might be portable, but C# programs are not.
nathanb 15y ago
These days it seems like much of a language's benefit to developers comes from its libraries rather than from the elegance of its syntax or the ease of implementing an algorithm. The big question is, how much of the "standard" libraries are supported on these devices? I remember writing a C# application using Winforms back mid-last-decade and assuming that portability would be a cinch...right up until I realized that Winforms weren't supported by Mono yet and I was supposed to use Glade# or some such nonsense. C#'s mindshare mostly comes from Windows GUI developers, and telling these folks that they can use their pet language only if they relearn all the libraries isn't going to be much of a win, I don't think.
funkah 15y ago
I feel like there is too much attention paid these days to who badmouthed your precious programming language, or whether your language has the appropriate amount of respect, or whatever. I'm a C# dev, sometimes. People have been hating on it (and its devs) for years, but it just doesn't matter. Get over it and use whatever language or other dev tool you want.
- mattgreenrocks 15y ago
  Usually, hate-ons are perpetuated by those who lack the skills to make shit happen. Or, at least, that's been my experience. They're usually more concerned with Being Right On The Internet than anything else.
sgt 15y ago
I am currently writing an "enterprise" style application and backend framework (WCF, Fluent NHibernate, Castle, json-emitting webservices, etc) based on C# and Mono. I'd like to hear more stories of others doing the same. Mono has all the functionality I need, the only possible worry that I have is that of the default GC (and I don't know if the newer GC is stable enough).
qusiba 15y ago
C# as a system language running on Mono is actually usable. But the thing is, I've never seen an IDE worse than MonoDevelop. Writing C# without Visual Studio, a large part of the benefit of the language just disappears. I would only use C# for window jobs, although I sincerely think it's a beautiful language.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
sreque 15y ago
C# is a good production language. It lets twiddle you your bits almost as well as C when you need to, provides a decent OO model, and has been piling on more functional and dynamic features as the years go by. However, as someone who has had to port a .Net C# app from windows to Linux, I can witness with sincerity that C# is NOT very portable. First of all, a lot of the C# APIs are written with windows in mind. An example is system mutexes. These just don't exist on Linux, and the mono implementation to emulate them is very buggy. Another example is the process counter API. Although much of this same information is available on Linux via the Proc table, Mono provides no equivalent API because it would be a lot of work to make one that works on all the Unix variants. There are many such examples of C#'s windows-centric API not being ported well in Mono. A bigger problem with Mono is that it just wasn't stable for us. The more standard library features we used, the more it would core dump on Linux even though it would never crash on windows. We ended up re-implementing a lot of functionality available in the standard library ourselves before the program stabilized on mono, which further incriminates the Mono stack. As a final note, we tried multiple versions of Mono, including 2.4, 2.6, and 2.10, and none of them worked well for us. If you want to write a fairly performant cross-platform app, the JVM is still a much better place to play in right now than .Net, even though I like C# the language a lot more than I do Java. You can also go the route of combining your favorite scripting language with C for the CPU-intensive parts.
knotty66 15y ago
Is anybody using Mono on Linux for ASP.NET MVC3 apps in production? If so, is it stable, fast? I wonder how it compares speed and stability wise to the Java Play Framework. I am currently using Play (and it's great!) but I much prefer C# as a language to Java ...

94 points by DonnyV 15y ago

You might be able to write C# and target different platforms, but I've yet to be convinced that a codebase can be shared across platforms as easily as some other languages/platforms.

DrJokepu 15y ago
We run non-trivial, large, unmodified .NET 4 C# ASP.NET MVC web apps (compiled on Windows) on Mac Mini Servers on OS X with Mono and Apache. Never had a single problem. It's almost creepy how well it works.
- zwp 15y ago
  That's interesting. Why do you do this?
  - DrJokepu 15y ago
    Well, it's complicated, but the main reason is that since our premises are just around the corner from one of the biggest Apple Stores in the world, we can replace any of our servers literally within minutes if they fail. This makes me sleep a lot easier at night. Also the savings on the electricity bill are not negligeable either.
    - cschep 15y ago
      You could still run windows server on those though..?
      - DrJokepu 15y ago
        I could (and indeed that was what we were originally planning when we decided to go with Mac Mini Servers), but I simply don't need to. I open the packaging, put Mono on it and it's ready for work. Why would I waste time with Windows Server if it's not needed?
    - traskjd 15y ago
      >> our premises are just around the corner from one of the biggest Apple Stores in the world, we can replace any of our servers literally within minutes if they fail I sure hope you don't have a server failure outside of business hours :-)
      - DrJokepu 15y ago
        I think we're prepared for that too. First, we have a few currently unused previous generation Mac Minis lying around that could be used temporarily. Second, since everything we need (Apache and PostgreSQL, minus Mono) comes preinstalled with OS X Server, these machines can easily take over each other's tasks temporarily, e.g. the database server can become a web server too until we can get a replacement. It's not ideal but it'd do during off-peak hours. Fortunately, the Apple Store is open even on Sundays so even in the worst case scenario we could get a replacement within 12 hours max, which is not necessarily the case with, say for example, Dell servers.

jinushaun 15y ago

Interesting. I always thought the Vita was running Android since it supports Android apps.

seanalltogether 15y ago
Are you sure about this. Reading their press release leads me to believe it's the other way around, that by developing for the Vita SDK, you can cross compile to Android if you choose. Supporting C# as the programming language, PS Suite SDK can run programs developed in C# on virtual machine equipped on both PS Certified devices and PS Vita. By supporting development for multiple devices and by adopting libraries to create a variety of content not only limited to games, PS Suite SDK will not only help developers save their cost in creating new content but also allow them to efficiently create their content on one SDK and without having to create on several different SDKs. Through PS Suite SDK, SCE will provide to game developers and publishers the potential to further expand their business opportunities to Android based portable devices. http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/sony-computer-entertainment-to-offer-software-development-kit-for-playstationsuite-starting-this-november-129854503.html http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/sony-computer-entert...

jcromartie 15y ago

Just like most languages, you can take some subset of C# and run it in many places. And, like most languages, there is some corner of the language that doesn't work on one platform or another. And most importantly, just like most languages, you end up depending on various libraries which may or may not be tied to hardware which makes significant parts of non-trivial applications non-portable. People don't make games in C# because it's C#. They make games using C# and XNA, or Unity, or some other framework. They don't make web apps in C#, but rather in (whatever flavor of) ASP.NET. And it turns out that these frameworks are the important bits. So when you choose to write something in C#, you are probably going to be choosing a framework that ties you down to a platform, and that's where the cross-platform nature of the language kind of becomes irrelevant. That's my experience, at least. If Clojure takes off on other runtimes, it will have this issue too. The JVM is it's "home" platform, and most Clojure software depends on JVM libraries, like how the vast majority of the C# software written thus far depends on Microsoft (and therefore Windows) libraries.

berntb 15y ago
>>If Clojure takes off on other runtimes, it will have this issue too. The JVM is it's "home" platform, and most Clojure software depends on JVM libraries, like how the vast majority of the C# software written thus far depends on Microsoft (and therefore Windows) libraries. There is a small difference. The Clojure/JVM runtime is ported to quite a lot of operating systems, where it runs quite well.

evilduck 15y ago

You can use C# everywhere, but in practice it just seems like a huge effort to avoid learning a new language to me. I have nothing against the language (writing C# is half of my day job), but all of these bridges are second-class citizens and built and maintained at the mercy of third parties just to interface with your target platform. Apple will never release updates for MonoMac or MonoTouch. Google isn't going to release C# Android SDKs or documentation. Mono for Linux always trails the Windows version and has significant community resistance, and Microsoft isn't going to integrate and maintain these bridges. You're also always losing something in the translation too, be it idiomatic style of the target API or C#, or being totally cut off from new native features, or severely restricting what community support or documentation is available to you. Any way you cut it, it's a second class experience. Worse, some of the bridges aren't free. You get to pay $400 for the privilege of not learning a little bit of Java or ObjC to get MonoTouch for Android or iOS. C# is good, but it's not so good that I refuse to learn other tools.

stonemetal 15y ago
While I fully agree with the losing something in translation. I don't agree that people are trying to skip learning things. It is a do I want to do 100% of my software development 3 times because I need a java version for one platform, Objective-C for the second and C# for the third. Oddly enough it seems like C++ is the only language all three platforms support natively.
- evilduck 15y ago
  Mono for iOS and Android and MonoMac for OSX all have different API calls for their respective platforms. GTK# is its own thing too. You might avoid a total rewrite from scratch, but the UI is going to need significant tailoring to each platform still. And it's not like Java, ObjC, and C# are radically different from one another. Does keeping C# as a constant really solve this problem? (I honestly don't know, I've never done a multiplatform product like this)
  - kitsune_ 15y ago

peterknego 15y ago

You could make the same argument about C, which exists on much more platforms than C#. But writing in C does not make a program portable. Neither does writing it in C#. So yes, C# compiler might be portable, but programs written in C# are not. So yes, C# compiler might be portable, but C# programs are not.

nathanb 15y ago

These days it seems like much of a language's benefit to developers comes from its libraries rather than from the elegance of its syntax or the ease of implementing an algorithm. The big question is, how much of the "standard" libraries are supported on these devices? I remember writing a C# application using Winforms back mid-last-decade and assuming that portability would be a cinch...right up until I realized that Winforms weren't supported by Mono yet and I was supposed to use Glade# or some such nonsense. C#'s mindshare mostly comes from Windows GUI developers, and telling these folks that they can use their pet language only if they relearn all the libraries isn't going to be much of a win, I don't think.

funkah 15y ago

I feel like there is too much attention paid these days to who badmouthed your precious programming language, or whether your language has the appropriate amount of respect, or whatever. I'm a C# dev, sometimes. People have been hating on it (and its devs) for years, but it just doesn't matter. Get over it and use whatever language or other dev tool you want.

mattgreenrocks 15y ago
Usually, hate-ons are perpetuated by those who lack the skills to make shit happen. Or, at least, that's been my experience. They're usually more concerned with Being Right On The Internet than anything else.

sgt 15y ago

I am currently writing an "enterprise" style application and backend framework (WCF, Fluent NHibernate, Castle, json-emitting webservices, etc) based on C# and Mono. I'd like to hear more stories of others doing the same. Mono has all the functionality I need, the only possible worry that I have is that of the default GC (and I don't know if the newer GC is stable enough).

qusiba 15y ago

C# as a system language running on Mono is actually usable. But the thing is, I've never seen an IDE worse than MonoDevelop. Writing C# without Visual Studio, a large part of the benefit of the language just disappears. I would only use C# for window jobs, although I sincerely think it's a beautiful language.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

sreque 15y ago

C# is a good production language. It lets twiddle you your bits almost as well as C when you need to, provides a decent OO model, and has been piling on more functional and dynamic features as the years go by. However, as someone who has had to port a .Net C# app from windows to Linux, I can witness with sincerity that C# is NOT very portable. First of all, a lot of the C# APIs are written with windows in mind. An example is system mutexes. These just don't exist on Linux, and the mono implementation to emulate them is very buggy. Another example is the process counter API. Although much of this same information is available on Linux via the Proc table, Mono provides no equivalent API because it would be a lot of work to make one that works on all the Unix variants. There are many such examples of C#'s windows-centric API not being ported well in Mono. A bigger problem with Mono is that it just wasn't stable for us. The more standard library features we used, the more it would core dump on Linux even though it would never crash on windows. We ended up re-implementing a lot of functionality available in the standard library ourselves before the program stabilized on mono, which further incriminates the Mono stack. As a final note, we tried multiple versions of Mono, including 2.4, 2.6, and 2.10, and none of them worked well for us. If you want to write a fairly performant cross-platform app, the JVM is still a much better place to play in right now than .Net, even though I like C# the language a lot more than I do Java. You can also go the route of combining your favorite scripting language with C for the CPU-intensive parts.

knotty66 15y ago

Is anybody using Mono on Linux for ASP.NET MVC3 apps in production? If so, is it stable, fast? I wonder how it compares speed and stability wise to the Java Play Framework. I am currently using Play (and it's great!) but I much prefer C# as a language to Java ...