7 ms·

Because Visual Studio is windows only.

by LordN00b 2y ago

SpaghettiCthulu 2y ago
Why do professional software developers use Visual Studio in the first place?
- high_na_euv 2y ago
  Because it is world class IDE, which is by far ahead of competition (except rider) for C#? I wish evey Lang had as good IDE as vs is
  - SpaghettiCthulu 2y ago
    Having used Visual Studio and Rider myself, I can say with confidence that you are correct: Rider is miles ahead in terms of stability and usability.
    - high_na_euv 2y ago
      Consider using free extensions like Roslynator then.
  - prmoustache 2y ago
    Why do professional developers use C# in the first place?
    - high_na_euv 2y ago
      One of the Best designed languages and most sane ecosystem by far I did c, cpp and c# for money and thats my experience. C# has lowest amount of WTFs per loc
      - KronisLV 2y ago
        Here's a recent comment of mine that talked about some of the ups and downs of choosing C# and .NET for a webdev project of mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40022126 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40022126 In short, nowadays it's a pretty strong contender and can fill in similar niches to Java (decent type system, good runtime, good tools, nowadays available on most platforms), with downsides that to me don't seem like dealbreakers (not as big of an ecosystem, which leads to breakages along the way when tools and libraries aren't as well maintained). I've also used Node, Python, Ruby, PHP, a bit of Go and some others on the back end, I'd say that it's a bit slower to develop in than many of those but the performance and maintainability of the code (especially the refactoring you can do in the IDEs) feels worth it. Maybe for not quick MVPs, but probably for multi-year projects.
      - SpaghettiCthulu 2y ago
        > I did c, cpp and c# for money and thats my experience. > > C# has lowest amount of WTFs per loc Sure, C# looks great when compared with C or C++, but that's a very low bar to pass. Compare it with Java, and it's on par at best. Compare it with Rust, and C# might as well be C.
    - josephg 2y ago
      Because it’s a good language. Fast enough for most applications. Memory safe enough. Easy enough to learn. Good enough type system. And it helps that it’s integrated into unity and windows. Also the ecosystem, compiler and IDE support is exceptional. It’s not perfect. It’s slower than native code. It has a worse type system than rust, Swift and typescript. (Burn the nulls!) And C# needs a runtime - which makes it annoying to deploy on Mac & Linux. I’d put it as an A tier language.
      - neonsunset 2y ago
        ARC and shared_ptr are net more expensive than GC, in throughput scenarios you will see that C++ often offers no meaningful performance advantage. Also Swift is significantly slower due to upfront ARC cost and defaulting to virtual dispatch in many places, more so than .NET with interface spam (Dynamic PGO takes care of it anyway). Nulls have stopped being an issue in practical terms since you specify nullability explicitly e.g. string?/string. C# does not need runtime installed on the host. You can produce JIT or AOT executables which include one. It also needs runtime on Windows just as much (if you don’t include it or host doesn’t have it installed). Only .NET Framework was preinstalled but no one (sane that is) chooses this legacy target for new code.
        josephg 2y ago
        Do you have some benchmark examples where C# beats the throughput of C++ using shared_ptr?
    - vbezhenar 2y ago
      It's pretty simple chain: 1. Most consumers using Windows. That might not be the case in USA, but definitely the case in the most of the world. 2. To develop for a platform, primary choice would be platform creator recommendation. In this case it's obviously .NET from Microsoft Visual Studio. It contains extensive UI libraries and components. There are alternatives, of course, you can use Qt or Electron or just web app. But you would need a good reason to move from the primary path. For many projects there's no good reason, so you naturally using .NET to write GUI applications for Windows. 3. To develop .NET GUI applications, you need Windows. Any other option is inferior. That was the case 10-20 years ago. So plenty of projects were created and plenty of developers were taught .NET and Windows. Today web apps are more popular. But .NET provides excellent support to create web apps, so there's no reason to switch from Windows. That's why many professional developers use C# even today. Of course different people might move different paths. But I think for majority that's the way. .NET GUI frameworks and may be Sharepoint created huge number of Windows developers.
      - prmoustache 2y ago
        I was just following the running gag, but thanks anyway. I did a bit of C# when, as a sysadmin, I was asked to do some kind of frontend that would hide the pocket pc interface so that employees in an hospital can use those pocket PC to order menus for the patients and not end up using them to browse shit or install unwanted apps. Security by obscurity in all its glory but they used to do the same with a very easily escapable panel replacing the default windows shell in Win95 and Win98. :)
      - neonsunset 2y ago
        Today, there is no reason to use Windows specifically when developing back-end or GUI (unless you're stuck with WPF and co) applications in .NET. Though the argument makes for a convenient straw-man since it used to be true until 2016.
  - repelsteeltje 2y ago
    Why do professional software developers use an IDE in the first place? (vim and a bash shell are all you need)
    - josephg 2y ago
      Because once a program is large enough, you can’t fit the whole thing in your head at once. Tools which help you bounce around and refactor code en masse help keep complexity under control and make you more productive.
      - AlexandrB 2y ago
        In my experience, IDEs often result in code that's more complex in the first place. Instead of keeping complexity under control, they introduce it since it's easier to work with more complex code if you have an IDE.
        josephg 2y ago
        IDEs don’t create complexity. But they do remove some of the natural downwards pressure on complexity that you get without an ide. I’ve been programming for 30 years and I still feel very mixed about that. For some projects, I figure who cares if it took us 30k lines to solve the problem. It’s just that complex, and more code = more optimised data structures and faster runtimes. On other days I’m reminded of how productive I can be with tiny programs or libraries that just solve their own niche exceptionally well. The best small libraries basically never need to be modified or updated. They just work and keep working forever. I don’t think this conflict can ever be solved once and for all. I’m sad that Chrome and Linux are around 20-30M lines of code. Would they be better or worse programs if they were smaller? It’s so hard to know.
        repelsteeltje 2y ago
        > more code = more optimised data structures and faster runtimes. Not sure if I agree, can you elaborate? Seems a more modest claim "more code allows for more optimized ds and faster runtimes" would be more accurate(?) At least, in the Pentium era it used to be that instructing compiler to optimize for size often resulted in faster code than optimizing for speed. That was of course the result of relatively small (text segment) caches and the often underestimated effects of temporal and spacial locality.
  - josephg 2y ago
    IntelliJ seems pretty close, at least in the languages I’ve used it in. Xcode used to be good as well, but now it seems slow and crashes all the time. It’s a terrible ambassador for the engineering culture at Apple.
    - SpaghettiCthulu 2y ago
      Intellij is ahead in my experience
    - vbezhenar 2y ago
      Xcode is a joke compared to VS or Idea.
  - KETHERCORTEX 2y ago
    I wish they didn't kill Monodevelop.
  - madeofpalk 2y ago
    It's embarrassing how much better Rider is as a C# IDE.
    - high_na_euv 2y ago
      Pure vs or vs with extensions? Because things like Roslynstor enhance vs significantly while Not slowing it down like resharper
      - madeofpalk 2y ago
        The product that Microsoft makes vs the product that Jetbrains makes.
        high_na_euv 2y ago
        Extensions are a part of ecosystem.
  - ecmascript 2y ago
    I did C# dev for a couple of years. I think VS is a shitty IDE. It's slow and laggy. So much so I started to use Visual Studio Code for some of the C# development I did. It's way worse than for example Jetbrains products by a large margin. What exactly with VS is so great? Maybe I didn't use that feature..
    - high_na_euv 2y ago
      Debugger, changing code at fly, expression evaluator
- jasode 2y ago
  >Why do professional software developers use Visual Studio in the first place? - to build C++/C# executables that are deployed to Windows computers. Examples are the millions of corporate desktops that already use Microsoft Office suite and home pcs with Windows for running AAA games. - to build ASP.NET web apps because the corporation chose the Microsoft stack of WindowsServer+SQLServer+C# instead of Linux+MySQL+PHP. Why do companies continue to use Windows instead of Linux? Often because they have lots of other desktop software that only runs on Windows. E.g. CAD, analytics, etc. If the target audience is already on Windows and the implementation language is C++/C# instead of Javascript/Electron, the easiest path for the developer is to also use Microsoft Visual Studio on Windows.
- jimcsharp 2y ago
  To make just a bunch of money.

Because Visual Studio is windows only.

SpaghettiCthulu 2y ago

Why do professional software developers use Visual Studio in the first place?

high_na_euv 2y ago
Because it is world class IDE, which is by far ahead of competition (except rider) for C#? I wish evey Lang had as good IDE as vs is
- SpaghettiCthulu 2y ago
  Having used Visual Studio and Rider myself, I can say with confidence that you are correct: Rider is miles ahead in terms of stability and usability.
  - high_na_euv 2y ago
    Consider using free extensions like Roslynator then.
- prmoustache 2y ago
  Why do professional developers use C# in the first place?
  - high_na_euv 2y ago
    One of the Best designed languages and most sane ecosystem by far I did c, cpp and c# for money and thats my experience. C# has lowest amount of WTFs per loc
    - KronisLV 2y ago
      Here's a recent comment of mine that talked about some of the ups and downs of choosing C# and .NET for a webdev project of mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40022126 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40022126 In short, nowadays it's a pretty strong contender and can fill in similar niches to Java (decent type system, good runtime, good tools, nowadays available on most platforms), with downsides that to me don't seem like dealbreakers (not as big of an ecosystem, which leads to breakages along the way when tools and libraries aren't as well maintained). I've also used Node, Python, Ruby, PHP, a bit of Go and some others on the back end, I'd say that it's a bit slower to develop in than many of those but the performance and maintainability of the code (especially the refactoring you can do in the IDEs) feels worth it. Maybe for not quick MVPs, but probably for multi-year projects.
    - SpaghettiCthulu 2y ago
      > I did c, cpp and c# for money and thats my experience. > > C# has lowest amount of WTFs per loc Sure, C# looks great when compared with C or C++, but that's a very low bar to pass. Compare it with Java, and it's on par at best. Compare it with Rust, and C# might as well be C.
  - josephg 2y ago
    Because it’s a good language. Fast enough for most applications. Memory safe enough. Easy enough to learn. Good enough type system. And it helps that it’s integrated into unity and windows. Also the ecosystem, compiler and IDE support is exceptional. It’s not perfect. It’s slower than native code. It has a worse type system than rust, Swift and typescript. (Burn the nulls!) And C# needs a runtime - which makes it annoying to deploy on Mac & Linux. I’d put it as an A tier language.
    - neonsunset 2y ago
      ARC and shared_ptr are net more expensive than GC, in throughput scenarios you will see that C++ often offers no meaningful performance advantage. Also Swift is significantly slower due to upfront ARC cost and defaulting to virtual dispatch in many places, more so than .NET with interface spam (Dynamic PGO takes care of it anyway). Nulls have stopped being an issue in practical terms since you specify nullability explicitly e.g. string?/string. C# does not need runtime installed on the host. You can produce JIT or AOT executables which include one. It also needs runtime on Windows just as much (if you don’t include it or host doesn’t have it installed). Only .NET Framework was preinstalled but no one (sane that is) chooses this legacy target for new code.
      - josephg 2y ago
        Do you have some benchmark examples where C# beats the throughput of C++ using shared_ptr?
  - vbezhenar 2y ago
    It's pretty simple chain: 1. Most consumers using Windows. That might not be the case in USA, but definitely the case in the most of the world. 2. To develop for a platform, primary choice would be platform creator recommendation. In this case it's obviously .NET from Microsoft Visual Studio. It contains extensive UI libraries and components. There are alternatives, of course, you can use Qt or Electron or just web app. But you would need a good reason to move from the primary path. For many projects there's no good reason, so you naturally using .NET to write GUI applications for Windows. 3. To develop .NET GUI applications, you need Windows. Any other option is inferior. That was the case 10-20 years ago. So plenty of projects were created and plenty of developers were taught .NET and Windows. Today web apps are more popular. But .NET provides excellent support to create web apps, so there's no reason to switch from Windows. That's why many professional developers use C# even today. Of course different people might move different paths. But I think for majority that's the way. .NET GUI frameworks and may be Sharepoint created huge number of Windows developers.
    - prmoustache 2y ago
      I was just following the running gag, but thanks anyway. I did a bit of C# when, as a sysadmin, I was asked to do some kind of frontend that would hide the pocket pc interface so that employees in an hospital can use those pocket PC to order menus for the patients and not end up using them to browse shit or install unwanted apps. Security by obscurity in all its glory but they used to do the same with a very easily escapable panel replacing the default windows shell in Win95 and Win98. :)
    - neonsunset 2y ago
      Today, there is no reason to use Windows specifically when developing back-end or GUI (unless you're stuck with WPF and co) applications in .NET. Though the argument makes for a convenient straw-man since it used to be true until 2016.
- repelsteeltje 2y ago
  Why do professional software developers use an IDE in the first place? (vim and a bash shell are all you need)
  - josephg 2y ago
    Because once a program is large enough, you can’t fit the whole thing in your head at once. Tools which help you bounce around and refactor code en masse help keep complexity under control and make you more productive.
    - AlexandrB 2y ago
      In my experience, IDEs often result in code that's more complex in the first place. Instead of keeping complexity under control, they introduce it since it's easier to work with more complex code if you have an IDE.
      - josephg 2y ago
        IDEs don’t create complexity. But they do remove some of the natural downwards pressure on complexity that you get without an ide. I’ve been programming for 30 years and I still feel very mixed about that. For some projects, I figure who cares if it took us 30k lines to solve the problem. It’s just that complex, and more code = more optimised data structures and faster runtimes. On other days I’m reminded of how productive I can be with tiny programs or libraries that just solve their own niche exceptionally well. The best small libraries basically never need to be modified or updated. They just work and keep working forever. I don’t think this conflict can ever be solved once and for all. I’m sad that Chrome and Linux are around 20-30M lines of code. Would they be better or worse programs if they were smaller? It’s so hard to know.
        repelsteeltje 2y ago
        > more code = more optimised data structures and faster runtimes. Not sure if I agree, can you elaborate? Seems a more modest claim "more code allows for more optimized ds and faster runtimes" would be more accurate(?) At least, in the Pentium era it used to be that instructing compiler to optimize for size often resulted in faster code than optimizing for speed. That was of course the result of relatively small (text segment) caches and the often underestimated effects of temporal and spacial locality.
- josephg 2y ago
  IntelliJ seems pretty close, at least in the languages I’ve used it in. Xcode used to be good as well, but now it seems slow and crashes all the time. It’s a terrible ambassador for the engineering culture at Apple.
  - SpaghettiCthulu 2y ago
    Intellij is ahead in my experience
  - vbezhenar 2y ago
    Xcode is a joke compared to VS or Idea.
- KETHERCORTEX 2y ago
  I wish they didn't kill Monodevelop.
- madeofpalk 2y ago
  It's embarrassing how much better Rider is as a C# IDE.
  - high_na_euv 2y ago
    Pure vs or vs with extensions? Because things like Roslynstor enhance vs significantly while Not slowing it down like resharper
    - madeofpalk 2y ago
      The product that Microsoft makes vs the product that Jetbrains makes.
      - high_na_euv 2y ago
        Extensions are a part of ecosystem.
- ecmascript 2y ago
  I did C# dev for a couple of years. I think VS is a shitty IDE. It's slow and laggy. So much so I started to use Visual Studio Code for some of the C# development I did. It's way worse than for example Jetbrains products by a large margin. What exactly with VS is so great? Maybe I didn't use that feature..
  - high_na_euv 2y ago
    Debugger, changing code at fly, expression evaluator
jasode 2y ago
>Why do professional software developers use Visual Studio in the first place? - to build C++/C# executables that are deployed to Windows computers. Examples are the millions of corporate desktops that already use Microsoft Office suite and home pcs with Windows for running AAA games. - to build ASP.NET web apps because the corporation chose the Microsoft stack of WindowsServer+SQLServer+C# instead of Linux+MySQL+PHP. Why do companies continue to use Windows instead of Linux? Often because they have lots of other desktop software that only runs on Windows. E.g. CAD, analytics, etc. If the target audience is already on Windows and the implementation language is C++/C# instead of Javascript/Electron, the easiest path for the developer is to also use Microsoft Visual Studio on Windows.
jimcsharp 2y ago
To make just a bunch of money.