5 ms·

Personally I think C# is miles ahead of Java and in meaningful ways (like a drastically better implementation of generics, not to mention value types have exist

Personally I think C# is miles ahead of Java and in meaningful ways (like a drastically better implementation of generics, not to mention value types have existed for eons at this point and an FFI system that doesn't hate you for using it) But nobody seems to talk about or care about C# except for Unity. Microsoft really missed the boat on getting mindshare for it back in the day.

bsaul 1y ago
Problem with C# isn't the language, it's the enterprise ecosystem. You always feel like you're going to have to pay at some point down the road for using the tech.
- cgh 1y ago
  Every large company I’ve ever worked at had a strict “no Microsoft on the server” policy and for better or worse, C# is closely identified with Microsoft.
  - runjake 1y ago
    IOW Linux on the server?
- hu3 1y ago
  I don't see Java being any better in this regard. Microsoft has been historically much less aggressive with lawyers compared to Oracle.
  - frontfor 1y ago
    That might be true for other Oracle products like the DB, but has that been true for Java and openjdk?
    - homebrewer 1y ago
      Sure. Here's just one example I was able to quickly find in the browser history: https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/09/users_advised_to_review_oracle_java_use/ https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/09/users_advised_to_revi... You can easily just not use the Oracle JDK, though, unless you're running commercial software which requires running on the Oracle runtime to get technical support. As others have said, the problem is not the runtime, but libraries: many major .NET libraries have been going fully commercial, you can't really trust the ecosystem anymore.
  - wslh 1y ago
    I think OP means that .NET has strong connections with Microsoft technologies where it is a natural decision to use Azure instead of AWS.
  - antod 1y ago
    The poster was talking about the ecosystem not the core platform. The wider Java ecosystem was heavily dominated by many Apache (and other) open source libraries vs commercial products for the C# ecosystem.
    - neonsunset 1y ago
      Most of the features that require Apache or community packages in Java ship out of box in .NET (or via extension packages). They also tend to be of higher quality and provide better performance.
  - cyberax 1y ago
    Java has a strong history of OpenSource, and a great set of libraries. It also pioneered the managed dependency system early (Maven), so these libraries have been centrally available for two decades. Moreover, a lot of these libraries are well-supported to this day. For example, Hibernate (the best ORM in business) is 28 years old, and has just released a new version. I recently consulted my former client (from 15 years ago), and I still recognized most parts of the stack that I set up way back then.
echelon 1y ago
That's because the Microsoft of 2000 - 2014, the Ballmer era, was Microsoft-first. It didn't care about other platforms, it didn't care about the web, and it didn't care about open source. C# could be great, but it existed in a bubble. Java kept growing and wound up everywhere. It played nice with Linux. Enterprise Mac developers didn't have trouble writing it with IntelliJ. It spread faster because it was open. Satya Nadella fixed a lot of Microsoft's ills, but it was too late for C# to rise to prominence. It's now the Github / TypeScript / AI era, and Satya is killing it. The one good thing to say about Ballmer is that he kicked off Azure. Microsoft grew from strength to strength after that.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- fuzztester 1y ago
  >Satya Nadella fixed a lot of Microsoft's ills, which ones?
  - echelon 1y ago
    So many. Microsoft isn't thought of as evil anymore, but is open source and Linux friendly. GitHub, VScode, Typescript. Azure is booming, ... But the big one: stock price.
    - Squeeeez 1y ago
      > Microsoft isn't thought of as evil anymore Maybe you don't think of it like that, but please remember that, especially with some decisions made in the past months, more and more people are turning away from everything Microsoft.
    - int_19h 1y ago
      Funny you should mention open source and VSCode. VSCode itself, for all the promotional materials about how it's open source, is officially "a distribution of the Code - OSS repository with Microsoft-specific customizations released under a traditional Microsoft product license". But wait, you might say, it's just like Chrome vs Chromium - so long as we have the OSS edition, it's all good! But, unless you're writing JS or TS, you need extensions to do anything useful. Python is an extension. So is C#, and C++. And all of these are partially closed source - e.g. code completion for all three, or debugging for both C# and C++. Worse yet, the licenses for those closed source parts specifically prohibit their installation and use in anything other than the official closed source VSCode distro. And this isn't just verbiage - there are actual runtime checks in all these products that block attempts to use them in VSCodium, Cursor etc. The same goes for the official VSCode extension gallery / marketplace - you can't legally use it from anything other than the official VSCode. Enforcing that is trickier, but even here Microsoft managed to find a way to frustrate its users: it used to be possible to download a .vsix from the Marketplace, but that feature has been removed recently, precisely because people were using that in conjunction with Cursor etc. Much open source, indeed.
jayd16 1y ago
Its actually quietly very popular in very boring contexts outside of Silicon Valley. Its also slowly entering new areas now that Linux builds are rock solid. MS does have an uphill PR battle though.
dagw 1y ago
nobody seems to talk about or care about C# except for Unity C# is extremely popular in all kinds of 'boring' industries. Having worked in areas like logistics and civil engineering, C# is everywhere.
watwut 1y ago
Definitely not. All the stuff I was used to get for free and advice I that was one google search away ... just dont exist in dotnet. Or is expensive. But most of the time, there is weaker library not doing nearly enough and that is all that exists.
nextos 1y ago
C# had the chance to learn from Java. Java was a bit rushed. Gosling said he was not given enough time to add closures. Even without generics, Java would have been quite elegant and much less verbose. The alternative, anonymous inner classes, were quite clunky. Nevertheless, as a platform, the JVM and JDK were fantastic and miles ahead most alternatives during the late 1990s and 2000s. The only platform for large development that offered some compelling advantages was Erlang, with BEAM and OTP.
- hocuspocus 1y ago
  Java could have easily caught up with C# in the early 2000s. In 2001 Pizza (Scala's ancestor) showcased generics, higher-order functions, ADTs and pattern matching. Interestingly enough only generics made it to Java in a reasonable timeframe, the rest came only much later. Aside from early versions being rushed, I feel that Java's success and adoption were the bigger issue. While Microsoft could iterate quickly and break backwards compatibility with major versions of C# and the .NET runtime, Java was deliberately moving at a much slower pace.
  - int_19h 1y ago
    In fact, Java 1.5 got generics in 2004, one year before C# 2.0 added them in 2005. OTOH C# 2.0 had anonymous delegates, although syntactically they were still very verbose (no type inference for arguments) and thus only marginally better than Java's anonymous classes. It was really from 2007 on (.NET 3.5 / C# 3.0) that C# started to get major features at an ever increasing pace while Java significantly stagnated for quite a long time.
    - hocuspocus 1y ago
      Thanks, my recollection of C# evolution was blurry, I stand corrected. So really, Sun and Oracle could have definitely moved faster around Java 6 and 7, the Java 8 release took a long time given the feature set. I feel that records could have come quicker, their implementation isn't exactly ground breaking. Avoiding the async/await route was a smart call though, and Loom could probably not have happened much earlier. Valhalla is another can of worms entirely
breadwinner 1y ago
One area where C# really messed up is exception handling. See https://mckoder.medium.com/the-achilles-heel-of-c-why-its-exception-handling-falls-short-f7f932488aba https://mckoder.medium.com/the-achilles-heel-of-c-why-its-ex...
- easton 1y ago
  They intentionally chose to not have checked exceptions though, and people have different opinions on it. They believed that people would just catch Exception most of the time anyway instead of selecting on a very specific type (which is often how it works, in web apps anyway.) https://www.artima.com/articles/the-trouble-with-checked-exceptions https://www.artima.com/articles/the-trouble-with-checked-exc...
  - breadwinner 1y ago
    > They believed that people would just catch Exception most of the time anyway Their belief was wrong. Microsoft now recommends against catching Exception. The article you linked to is addressed at the bottom of this article: https://mckoder.medium.com/the-achilles-heel-of-c-why-its-exception-handling-falls-short-f7f932488aba https://mckoder.medium.com/the-achilles-heel-of-c-why-its-ex...
- neonsunset 1y ago
  IIRC all previous conversations about checked exceptions here ended up with the swift conclusion that they are heavily discouraged throughout Java code.
  - breadwinner 1y ago
    > they are heavily discouraged throughout Java code That's so ignorant. Read the article please.
    - neonsunset 1y ago
      Let's revisit past conversations: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43226624 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43226624 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43584056 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43584056 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36736326 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36736326 And more. I'm not sure what you found in (checked) exceptions. If you'd like explicit error handling, we have holy grail in the form of Rust which beautifully solves it with implicit returns, error type conversions and disambiguation between error and panic model. I'd prefer to use that one as it actually reduces boilerplate and improves correctness, the opposite to the outcome of using checked exceptions.
wokkel 1y ago
It barely works on non MS platforms,has had many slightly incompatible versions so it's a non starter for many projects where I run into that might benefit from c#. I spoke to a manager recently who had invested in silverlight in the past. Based on that alone it was a no MS policy for his development teams.
- runjake 1y ago
  AFIACT, either most or at least a significant percentage of dotnet code runs on Linux, depending on the industry.
- neonsunset 1y ago
  Quite a few languages "loved" by "Linux communities" tend to have rather rudimentary integration with Linux kernel's facilities or worse packaging story. For example, Go does not understand cgroups limits and needs an external package to solve this. .NET can read and accommodate those natively. It also ships with excellent epoll-based socket engine implementation. It's on par with Go (although I'm not sure which one is better, but .NET performs really well on high-throughput workloads).
- tester756 1y ago
  >It barely works on non MS platforms What a bullshit I've been running C# on Linux on production web apps backends since 2018 and had no issues
- blandflakes 1y ago
  We've been running .NET on linux for years, what are you talking about?
astura 1y ago
C# isn't popular in startups for the same reason Java isn't, it's "boring." It's an extremely common language in "boring" companies doing "boring" (but profitable) work.
astrange 1y ago
> But nobody seems to talk about or care about C# except for Unity. Microsoft really missed the boat on getting mindshare for it back in the day. There was this guy Miguel de Icaza. From when I followed the open source ecosystem at the time, it seemed to be his personal mission to promote independent clones of a bunch of Microsoft technologies like C# on his own time even though they didn't ask him to do it. I don't think I ever understood why someone would do this. It's like in the 2000s where people seemed to think you could solve all technical problems by inventing new kinds of XML.
- bitwize 1y ago
  The founding document of GNOME was written by de Icaza. It was called "Let's Make Unix Not Suck", and his proposal for not sucking was basically to import much of the design of Windows and specifically COM into Linux as open source. https://web.archive.org/web/20000815075927/http://www.helixcode.com/~miguel/bongo-bong.html https://web.archive.org/web/20000815075927/http://www.helixc... Miguel de Icaza has been stanning for Microsoft technologies, literally since the nineties.
TacticalCoder 1y ago
[dead]
throw1235435 1y ago
Depends where you work. I've seen a lot of Java and .NET jobs around where I am. Having both jobs I find it easier to get performant code in .NET than Java (reified generics, value types, more primitives/less boxing in general, and other constructs not found in Java)

bsaul 1y ago

Problem with C# isn't the language, it's the enterprise ecosystem. You always feel like you're going to have to pay at some point down the road for using the tech.

cgh 1y ago
Every large company I’ve ever worked at had a strict “no Microsoft on the server” policy and for better or worse, C# is closely identified with Microsoft.
- runjake 1y ago
  IOW Linux on the server?
hu3 1y ago
I don't see Java being any better in this regard. Microsoft has been historically much less aggressive with lawyers compared to Oracle.
- frontfor 1y ago
  That might be true for other Oracle products like the DB, but has that been true for Java and openjdk?
  - homebrewer 1y ago
    Sure. Here's just one example I was able to quickly find in the browser history: https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/09/users_advised_to_review_oracle_java_use/ https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/09/users_advised_to_revi... You can easily just not use the Oracle JDK, though, unless you're running commercial software which requires running on the Oracle runtime to get technical support. As others have said, the problem is not the runtime, but libraries: many major .NET libraries have been going fully commercial, you can't really trust the ecosystem anymore.
- wslh 1y ago
  I think OP means that .NET has strong connections with Microsoft technologies where it is a natural decision to use Azure instead of AWS.
- antod 1y ago
  The poster was talking about the ecosystem not the core platform. The wider Java ecosystem was heavily dominated by many Apache (and other) open source libraries vs commercial products for the C# ecosystem.
  - neonsunset 1y ago
    Most of the features that require Apache or community packages in Java ship out of box in .NET (or via extension packages). They also tend to be of higher quality and provide better performance.
- cyberax 1y ago
  Java has a strong history of OpenSource, and a great set of libraries. It also pioneered the managed dependency system early (Maven), so these libraries have been centrally available for two decades. Moreover, a lot of these libraries are well-supported to this day. For example, Hibernate (the best ORM in business) is 28 years old, and has just released a new version. I recently consulted my former client (from 15 years ago), and I still recognized most parts of the stack that I set up way back then.

echelon 1y ago

That's because the Microsoft of 2000 - 2014, the Ballmer era, was Microsoft-first. It didn't care about other platforms, it didn't care about the web, and it didn't care about open source. C# could be great, but it existed in a bubble. Java kept growing and wound up everywhere. It played nice with Linux. Enterprise Mac developers didn't have trouble writing it with IntelliJ. It spread faster because it was open. Satya Nadella fixed a lot of Microsoft's ills, but it was too late for C# to rise to prominence. It's now the Github / TypeScript / AI era, and Satya is killing it. The one good thing to say about Ballmer is that he kicked off Azure. Microsoft grew from strength to strength after that.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
fuzztester 1y ago
>Satya Nadella fixed a lot of Microsoft's ills, which ones?
- echelon 1y ago
  So many. Microsoft isn't thought of as evil anymore, but is open source and Linux friendly. GitHub, VScode, Typescript. Azure is booming, ... But the big one: stock price.
  - Squeeeez 1y ago
    > Microsoft isn't thought of as evil anymore Maybe you don't think of it like that, but please remember that, especially with some decisions made in the past months, more and more people are turning away from everything Microsoft.
  - int_19h 1y ago
    Funny you should mention open source and VSCode. VSCode itself, for all the promotional materials about how it's open source, is officially "a distribution of the Code - OSS repository with Microsoft-specific customizations released under a traditional Microsoft product license". But wait, you might say, it's just like Chrome vs Chromium - so long as we have the OSS edition, it's all good! But, unless you're writing JS or TS, you need extensions to do anything useful. Python is an extension. So is C#, and C++. And all of these are partially closed source - e.g. code completion for all three, or debugging for both C# and C++. Worse yet, the licenses for those closed source parts specifically prohibit their installation and use in anything other than the official closed source VSCode distro. And this isn't just verbiage - there are actual runtime checks in all these products that block attempts to use them in VSCodium, Cursor etc. The same goes for the official VSCode extension gallery / marketplace - you can't legally use it from anything other than the official VSCode. Enforcing that is trickier, but even here Microsoft managed to find a way to frustrate its users: it used to be possible to download a .vsix from the Marketplace, but that feature has been removed recently, precisely because people were using that in conjunction with Cursor etc. Much open source, indeed.

jayd16 1y ago

Its actually quietly very popular in very boring contexts outside of Silicon Valley. Its also slowly entering new areas now that Linux builds are rock solid. MS does have an uphill PR battle though.

dagw 1y ago

nobody seems to talk about or care about C# except for Unity C# is extremely popular in all kinds of 'boring' industries. Having worked in areas like logistics and civil engineering, C# is everywhere.

watwut 1y ago

Definitely not. All the stuff I was used to get for free and advice I that was one google search away ... just dont exist in dotnet. Or is expensive. But most of the time, there is weaker library not doing nearly enough and that is all that exists.

nextos 1y ago

C# had the chance to learn from Java. Java was a bit rushed. Gosling said he was not given enough time to add closures. Even without generics, Java would have been quite elegant and much less verbose. The alternative, anonymous inner classes, were quite clunky. Nevertheless, as a platform, the JVM and JDK were fantastic and miles ahead most alternatives during the late 1990s and 2000s. The only platform for large development that offered some compelling advantages was Erlang, with BEAM and OTP.

hocuspocus 1y ago
Java could have easily caught up with C# in the early 2000s. In 2001 Pizza (Scala's ancestor) showcased generics, higher-order functions, ADTs and pattern matching. Interestingly enough only generics made it to Java in a reasonable timeframe, the rest came only much later. Aside from early versions being rushed, I feel that Java's success and adoption were the bigger issue. While Microsoft could iterate quickly and break backwards compatibility with major versions of C# and the .NET runtime, Java was deliberately moving at a much slower pace.
- int_19h 1y ago
  In fact, Java 1.5 got generics in 2004, one year before C# 2.0 added them in 2005. OTOH C# 2.0 had anonymous delegates, although syntactically they were still very verbose (no type inference for arguments) and thus only marginally better than Java's anonymous classes. It was really from 2007 on (.NET 3.5 / C# 3.0) that C# started to get major features at an ever increasing pace while Java significantly stagnated for quite a long time.
  - hocuspocus 1y ago
    Thanks, my recollection of C# evolution was blurry, I stand corrected. So really, Sun and Oracle could have definitely moved faster around Java 6 and 7, the Java 8 release took a long time given the feature set. I feel that records could have come quicker, their implementation isn't exactly ground breaking. Avoiding the async/await route was a smart call though, and Loom could probably not have happened much earlier. Valhalla is another can of worms entirely

breadwinner 1y ago

One area where C# really messed up is exception handling. See https://mckoder.medium.com/the-achilles-heel-of-c-why-its-exception-handling-falls-short-f7f932488aba https://mckoder.medium.com/the-achilles-heel-of-c-why-its-ex...

easton 1y ago
They intentionally chose to not have checked exceptions though, and people have different opinions on it. They believed that people would just catch Exception most of the time anyway instead of selecting on a very specific type (which is often how it works, in web apps anyway.) https://www.artima.com/articles/the-trouble-with-checked-exceptions https://www.artima.com/articles/the-trouble-with-checked-exc...
- breadwinner 1y ago
  > They believed that people would just catch Exception most of the time anyway Their belief was wrong. Microsoft now recommends against catching Exception. The article you linked to is addressed at the bottom of this article: https://mckoder.medium.com/the-achilles-heel-of-c-why-its-exception-handling-falls-short-f7f932488aba https://mckoder.medium.com/the-achilles-heel-of-c-why-its-ex...
neonsunset 1y ago
IIRC all previous conversations about checked exceptions here ended up with the swift conclusion that they are heavily discouraged throughout Java code.
- breadwinner 1y ago
  > they are heavily discouraged throughout Java code That's so ignorant. Read the article please.
  - neonsunset 1y ago
    Let's revisit past conversations: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43226624 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43226624 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43584056 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43584056 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36736326 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36736326 And more. I'm not sure what you found in (checked) exceptions. If you'd like explicit error handling, we have holy grail in the form of Rust which beautifully solves it with implicit returns, error type conversions and disambiguation between error and panic model. I'd prefer to use that one as it actually reduces boilerplate and improves correctness, the opposite to the outcome of using checked exceptions.

wokkel 1y ago

It barely works on non MS platforms,has had many slightly incompatible versions so it's a non starter for many projects where I run into that might benefit from c#. I spoke to a manager recently who had invested in silverlight in the past. Based on that alone it was a no MS policy for his development teams.

runjake 1y ago
AFIACT, either most or at least a significant percentage of dotnet code runs on Linux, depending on the industry.
neonsunset 1y ago
Quite a few languages "loved" by "Linux communities" tend to have rather rudimentary integration with Linux kernel's facilities or worse packaging story. For example, Go does not understand cgroups limits and needs an external package to solve this. .NET can read and accommodate those natively. It also ships with excellent epoll-based socket engine implementation. It's on par with Go (although I'm not sure which one is better, but .NET performs really well on high-throughput workloads).
tester756 1y ago
>It barely works on non MS platforms What a bullshit I've been running C# on Linux on production web apps backends since 2018 and had no issues
blandflakes 1y ago
We've been running .NET on linux for years, what are you talking about?

astura 1y ago

C# isn't popular in startups for the same reason Java isn't, it's "boring." It's an extremely common language in "boring" companies doing "boring" (but profitable) work.

astrange 1y ago

> But nobody seems to talk about or care about C# except for Unity. Microsoft really missed the boat on getting mindshare for it back in the day. There was this guy Miguel de Icaza. From when I followed the open source ecosystem at the time, it seemed to be his personal mission to promote independent clones of a bunch of Microsoft technologies like C# on his own time even though they didn't ask him to do it. I don't think I ever understood why someone would do this. It's like in the 2000s where people seemed to think you could solve all technical problems by inventing new kinds of XML.

bitwize 1y ago
The founding document of GNOME was written by de Icaza. It was called "Let's Make Unix Not Suck", and his proposal for not sucking was basically to import much of the design of Windows and specifically COM into Linux as open source. https://web.archive.org/web/20000815075927/http://www.helixcode.com/~miguel/bongo-bong.html https://web.archive.org/web/20000815075927/http://www.helixc... Miguel de Icaza has been stanning for Microsoft technologies, literally since the nineties.

TacticalCoder 1y ago

[dead]

throw1235435 1y ago

Depends where you work. I've seen a lot of Java and .NET jobs around where I am. Having both jobs I find it easier to get performant code in .NET than Java (reified generics, value types, more primitives/less boxing in general, and other constructs not found in Java)