24 ms·

For us, every .NET upgrade since .NET 5 has gone surprisingly smoothly and reduced CPU/RAM usage by 10–15%. We were even able to downgrade our cloud servers to

by jitbit 11mo ago

For us, every .NET upgrade since .NET 5 has gone surprisingly smoothly and reduced CPU/RAM usage by 10–15%. We were even able to downgrade our cloud servers to smaller instances, literally. I wish .NET was more popular among startups, if only C# could get rid of the "enterpisey" stigma.

oaiey 11mo ago
Can only confirm that. Such a smooth platform overall for web and API development. We use it with several 100 devs on it and the choice never failed us, neither in technology or hiring. And it is not that we have .NET gurus or anything.
- balamatom 11mo ago
  [flagged]
  - LandR 11mo ago
    > Apropos, what do they do for fun? Odd question, but as a .NET developer myself Mountaineering, climbing, bouldering, going to gigs, playing pool, running, music festivals, gaming, photography, watching F1, watching NBA, eating out with friends... I'm not sure what the point of the question was ?
    - balamatom 11mo ago
      Ah, well, obviously the point of the question was to be odd for oddness's sake, as some form of bizarre, self-inflatory social ploy! I couldn't possibly have intended my question as a straightforward request for information about something, now could I? That would just be weirdy-weird, if people started asking each other questions for the purpose of receiving answers. Thanks for answering though.
      - LandR 11mo ago
        The reason I thought it was odd was that I've never seen any correlation between someones hobbies outside of work and what tech stack they use at work.
        balamatom 11mo ago
        That's OK. I keep seeing a correlation between people's proneness to be like >The reason I thought it was odd was that I've never seen [it] and which tech stacks they feel more comfortable with.
  - recursive 11mo ago
    > what do they do for fun? Play in a band, ride bikes, play video games. Sample size of one.
    - balamatom 11mo ago
      >Play in a band Cool, what genre?
      - recursive 11mo ago
        Rock mostly covers. I play keyboard. Trying to learn to sing. Progress is mixed.
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
- larrik 11mo ago
  As a counter-point, my company was original purely .NET, then added Python (and later JS). For us, hiring .NET is WAY harder than the other stacks. We get a lot more applicants in general, but almost zero that meet our standards. For Python roles we get way fewer applicants, but the average quality is much much higher than the .NET average. (JS is a whole other thing, and we frankly aren't as good at hiring there yet)
  - zerr 11mo ago
    Do you measure that standard by leetcode?
    - larrik 11mo ago
      No, we don't do any coding tests, just discussions of what you've done and how deep your knowledge of your tools goes. .NET folks are far less likely to understand much beyond the syntax, nevermind the "why" of things (even WHY you need StringBuilder) or what a database index is, etc.
      - zerr 11mo ago
        Interesting. One would thing, "script kiddies" would be more common among Pythonistas. On the other hand, .NET might be more user-friendly, so that devs are productive even without the knowledge of what's going on under the hood. Kudos for the interview practices, that's similar to how I conduct as well :)
catlover76 11mo ago
> I wish .NET was more popular among startups, if only C# could get rid of the "enterpisey" stigma. There's that, but there's also the developer experience and functionality for people to run it on Mac and Linux. We have a small C# service that we run locally via Docker (which I think is usually the optimal setup anyways) and develop with VSCode. Since it's small, it has worked well. Would it work well if that was our main backend? Not sure. Wish I had the option of full Visual Studio on Mac for it regardless.
- mrsmrtss 11mo ago
  You can run .NET natively on Mac, if you wish. I would also recommend JetBrains Rider over VSCode; it works on Linux, Mac, and Windows and, in my opinion, is better than Visual Studio anyway.
  - nozzlegear 11mo ago
    I use Rider† daily to write F# and C# on my Mac. It works great, I have no issues with it. It even handles the .NET Framework 4.8 code‡ that I maintain without any issues thanks to Mono. † And Neovim occasionally, but I mostly use it for Typescript or anything that isn't F#/C#. ‡ https://github.com/nozzlegear/shopifysharp https://github.com/nozzlegear/shopifysharp
- phillipcarter 11mo ago
  Rider is your option there, it's better than Visual Studio (I used to work on VS).
  - starvar 11mo ago
    How is it so different than Visual Studio that you think it is "better"?
    - Deukhoofd 11mo ago
      I switched over entirely to Rider as well, in my experience it's far more performant, has a far smoother UX, has a lot more functionality for power users, and includes Resharper by default, giving you access to a bunch more powerful inspections and refactoring.
leetharris 11mo ago
> I wish .NET was more popular among startups, if only C# could get rid of the "enterpisey" stigma. Too hard to ignore the benefits of cross-stack gains in Typescript/Python. The C# native phone, Blazor, etc just isn't quite there yet. Tried it at the last company, and full stack TS was just so much easier to do. The reality is that the vast majority of startups don't make it. The #1 thing startups should be focusing on is hiring the right people and product velocity. TS just makes that easier in my experience.
- phillipcarter 11mo ago
  Is it though? Backends can be any language and there's a lot more variety there -- TS+node, Go, Python, Java. It's just .NET that's largely ignored for no real technical basis.
  - cebert 11mo ago
    You can easily use the same types and libraries in your backend and frontend with TypeScript. It’s not at easy with dotnet.
    - phito 11mo ago
      OpenAPI and client generators solve this issue easily.
      - robertlagrant 11mo ago
        No, that's not true. If you share code like this then you can do things like put the same validation code in the frontend and the backend: frontend to give a nice user experience, and backend to protect the endpoint.
        littlecranky67 11mo ago
        OpenAPI does support patterns for fields and nullables/non-nullables - that already gets you very far regarding validation. A decently sophisticated generator (which don't exist IMHO) would generate the validation code for your respective language.
vintagedave 11mo ago
.Net is also good as a platform for other languages. I recently started working with RemObjects, and you can compile languages like Java, Swift, Go and more (VB, Pascal) to .Net. Then, the whole framework and ecosystem is available. I'm liking it a lot. They have customers who are startups and the 'got to have tools' folk like having lots of languages since they can onboard people who know anything-not-C# and benefit from the .Net library.
- sfn42 11mo ago
  > they can onboard people who know anything-not-C# and benefit from the .Net library I don't get this mindset. I'd much rather have the new guy spend a few months getting used to a new language, than have an organization where everyone uses different languages. It's a nightmare a few years down the road when you have 20 different projects in 15 different languages and the people who built them are mostly gone. People are way too lenient with this stuff IMO. The goal of an organization should be to have one solution to each problem. For example we use .NET for backend and React for frontend. You don't need anything else. People love to talk about the right tool for the job, it's all BS. You can make pretty much any kind of website using react and pretty much any kind of backend using C#. The only reason to choose anything else is preference. And sure maybe you have some data science people who need python, thats fine. Just don't have one guy using Py, another using R and yet others using Matlab. That's just asking for trouble. Pick one, stick to it. If you're going to make a change then migrate everything. If it's not worth that then the new tool probably isn't such a big deal after all.
  - netdevphoenix 11mo ago
    > People love to talk about the right tool for the job, it's all BS This sounds very close minded to me. It is certainly true that there exist tasks if not subdomains where some ecosystems are better than others. Using a hammer for everything might work for you if all your problems are nails. But that doesn't mean that all problems out there are nails
    - mhfu 11mo ago
randyburden 11mo ago
For what it's worth, the startup I currently work for is built entirely in C# and .NET, as was my previous employer. Both startups are based in the Dallas, TX area. Across both companies, applications were hosted on Azure and AWS using a mix of PaaS services and virtual machines running Windows and Linux. We've consistently found this stack to enable strong productivity and high-velocity release cadences.
- DeathArrow 11mo ago
  At my current workplace we use a mix of on premise servers and Azure but at former workplaces we deployed to Google Cloud and AWS.
- miki123211 11mo ago
  > Both startups are based in the Dallas, TX area. Aah that explains it. For some reason, .NET is extremely popular outside of major tech hubs (notably in Europe), where you're much more likely to work for (without loss of generality) Ikea than for Google.
  - cheschire 11mo ago
    The Dallas area is a major tech hub. It’s just an older hub of major enterprisey type companies with major tech divisions there like Texas Instruments, AT&T, Bank of America, defense contractors like Lockheed, etc. Office Space took place there before the dotcom bust. Less enterprisey, but John Carmack and id Software also started there.
    - raw_anon_1111 11mo ago
      I lived and worked in Atlanta from 1996-2020. Those aren’t anymore tech companies than Delta, Home Depot or Coke by modern definitions. In all of the companies you named, software development is a cost center, not a profit center - follow the money. Who gets paid the most as a group at those companies? Those are enterprise companies.
      - 11mo ago
tinyspacewizard 11mo ago
Start-ups should strongly consider F#. It's a force multiplier when you have a small team of strong developers.
- Xelbair 11mo ago
  >startups should consider niche language with extremely limited hiring pool. sure, but only if you're doing something that actually demands it - and actual innovation - instead of usual 'lets repackage XYZ as SaaS and growthhack' strategy.
  - dude250711 11mo ago
    It's good for, and I am not being sarcastic or snarky, justifying high pay and gate-keeping. Developers should set up more barriers for entry - look at doctors and lawyers.
    - stiiv 11mo ago
      I think I agree with you. When I was part of a growing F# team a number of years ago, everyone we hired was an enthusiast who just loved coding in F# and wanted an opportunity to do it professionally. It turned out that this love, combined with the constraints of the language, led to a super-clean and legible code base. The quality was (in my estimation) outstanding, and I was sad to leave it.
      - z500 11mo ago
        As an F# lover my heart sank at that "it turned out" at first. I'm glad someone got to live the dream somewhere haha
      - banashark 11mo ago
        I'm at my current company (actually writing mostly typescript and node services now) because of a YC "who's hiring" post that mentioned F# positions (bait and switch /s, but my experience lined up heavily with the team I ended up joining which didn't use F#).
olavgg 11mo ago
As a startup, what is it in for me to switch from Java, Spring Boot, Hibernate, Beam, Flink, Pulsar, Vault, KeyCloak ecosystem to C#.Net? Is the documentation better? Do I get better performance? Is the community larger and more stable?
- littlecranky67 11mo ago
  Yes.
- Xelbair 11mo ago
  Vault, Keycloak, Flink are language agnostic or there exist bindings for most popular languages. Documentation is vastly better compared to Java ones, it's like day and night, LINQ is vastly superior to anything that Java offered - but i haven't used java in a very long time. And every time i had to write java it felt like i went backwards in time by 5-10 years. If i remember right Java's webserver beats ASP.NET in performance benchmarks but .net's one performance is good enough that it does not matter until you hit really big usercount - and at that point you usually have to rethink your architecture anyways. But frankly .net is still mostly Microsoft Java but with better developer ergonomics in my opinion. It did shed a lot of overengineered OOP legacy from .net framework days though and we're seeing major performance improvements with every version.
  - mrsmrtss 11mo ago
    >If i remember right Java's webserver beats ASP.NET in performance benchmarks That's not the case anymore. Kestrel is one of the fastest servers there is, and it beats every Java server out there.
    - hans0l074 11mo ago
      I do not have any benchmarks other than this[1] to refer to, but I work with Quarkus[2] and Java 25 LTS (just recently released) services deployed on AWS EKS and we are very happy with the performance (for mobile game backends) [1]: https://sharkbench.dev/web https://sharkbench.dev/web [2]: https://quarkus.io/ https://quarkus.io/
jgilias 11mo ago
Startups typically have the tech stack that the one man army tech co-founder set up on no budget. Apparently then .NET isn’t too popular for that!
- thewebguyd 11mo ago
  That's part of it, but is also weird because C# & .NET is probably one of the most productive single-developer stack you can choose. Modern ASP.NET handles so much for you it's a lot like Rails in that regard, you can get a lot done in it solo.
defraudbah 11mo ago
agree, but it lost the battle when windows was an exclusive platform for it, even when mono was rising in popularity
netol 11mo ago
The XML/config side of things just isn't for everyone. Sometimes Go's simplicity wins out.
- neonsunset 11mo ago
  It is as simple as what you get with Cargo, and possibly even more readable. .NET, unlike Go, has all needed management commands built into its CLI too: dotnet new {template}, dotnet add/remove package, dotnet sln add/remove, etc.
- loldot_ 11mo ago
  One of the big features in .net 10 is the ability to do `dotnet file.cs` to run an application, with package import and assembly attributes directly in the file.
brainzap 11mo ago
too much microsoft
masfoobar 11mo ago
I think the "confusing" aspect with C#, being part of the Microsoft eco-system, is that there are many smaller companies (and startups) that may have concern paying for such tools. To the uneducated, C# is linked to Visual Studio.. the IDE.. and the Community edition if free as long as you are a student, open-source, and individuals. Professional and Enterprise are paid. (Yes - there is Visual Studio Code) Again, I am looking at this from the uneducated. With the above, as well as "going with other Microsoft products" things start to get more expensive. Need a database - should it be SQL Server? Should it be Windows Servers? etc. Because of the above, I would not be surprised if Go is more popular especially for startups... alongside Linux, MySQL/Postgres, as well as other IDE or text editors. Sure.. I might agree that Visual Studio Code is suited for various programmers today. Not suggesting you are wrong in any way. It's just the amount of money spent on Windows/Microsoft for small companies is rather large, compared to other alternatives that are just as good.
- CharlieDigital 11mo ago
  > It's just the amount of money spent on Windows/Microsoft for small companies is rather large, compared to other alternatives that are just as good. This is a complete mis-perception about the modern ecosystem. We have a full team using C# at a series-C, YC startup with every developer on Macs (some on Beelinks and Linux). The team is using a mix of VS Code, Cursor, and Rider. We deploy to Linux container instances in GKE on Google Cloud running Postgres. There is no more tie in to Microsoft licensing than there is say for TypeScript. Yes, C# DevKit is licensed like VS, but if you don't need the features, then you can also use DotRush or just use the free C# Extension.
  - martinald 11mo ago
    Totally agree. Ironically dotnet runs better on Linux/Mac systems in my experience. All our devs who use Windows for dotnet dev now use WSL2 as it matches production. We don't use any other 'commercial' Microsoft products like SQL Server or Azure. All postgres/redis/etc and deploy onto docker containers.
    - 11mo ago
CharlieDigital 11mo ago
I'm at a series-C, YC startup. We made a switch from TypeScript to C# two months back. Now we have a team of over a dozen backend engineers working on C# transitioning from TypeScript. 90% are working with C# for the first time. (We are still hiring backend C# engs!) I can say that it has gone waaaaaay smoother than anyone would have thought. This is a decision (language switch) that the team has been putting off for a long time and simply suffering through some big time jank and complexity with TypeScript (yes, TS at scale becomes complex in a very different way from C# because it becomes complex at the tooling layer in an "unbounded" way whereas C#'s language complexity is "bounded"). Indeed, I think more teams should give C# a shot. My own experience is that C# and TypeScript at a language level are remarkably alike[0] that if you know one well, you can probably quickly learn the other. But the C# ecosystem tooling is more cohesive, easier to grok, and less fickle compared to JS/TS (as is the case with Go, Java, etc. as well). There still remains a lot of mis-perceptions about C# and .NET in general and I think that many startups should spend the time to give EF Core a shot and realize how every option in JS-land ends up feeling like a toy. EF Core itself is worth the price of admission, IMO. [0] https://typescript-is-like-csharp.chrlschn.dev/ https://typescript-is-like-csharp.chrlschn.dev/
- fud101 11mo ago
  So should I learn C# by learning Typescript? Does that make sense?
  - stanac 11mo ago
    Not really, you should learn Typescript by learning JavaScript first. Then consider learning C#. Or if you want to focus on the back end side learn C# and skip TS/JS. They are created by the same person but they are very different in my opinion. TypeScript is "a tool" for JS, it is possible to compile without errors but still fail in runtime (e.g. wrong object type returned from API), on the other hand parsing JSON with C# will give you correct object type, it may fail if some properties are missing but it will fail at parsing call, not further down when you try to use missing property. In other words typing is not glued on top of the language it's core of the language.
  - 11mo ago
christophilus 11mo ago
I really liked working with C#. I spent 15 years or so with it and found it very productive. But no; I don’t miss the culture of C# / Microsoft shops at all.
- mexicocitinluez 11mo ago
  > culture of C# / Microsoft shops at al What do you mean?
  - array_key_first 11mo ago
    I worked at a Microsoft shop, and this was my experience. 1. Process, process, and more process. Doing anything required layers of management approval. Trivial tasks become month long, or even years long, processes. 2. You have no power or agency. Something is broken? You're a developer, you should be able to fix it right? No. Broken things stay broken. You swim in your lane and keep your head down. Mediocrity is the goal. 3. Optimization doesn't exist. If a process is manual and takes you, a developer, 10 hours, then that's what it is. Nobody gives a flying fuck about tooling. Nobody cares if you spend 50% of your dev time doing random stuff. And if you even dare try to fix it, you will be told it's impossible and you're wasting your time. 4. Management is king. You will have to lie to them. You will have to spend time re-entering the same data in 5 different places so they can read it conveniently. You will have to make Excel workbooks. You will have to dumb things down, and then dumb them down again, and again. Everything is about Jira... Unless they're a really high up manager, in which case you have to take whatever is in Jira and put it in a word doc and send it to them, because they don't know how to open Jira.
    - atraac 11mo ago
      Those things have nothing to do with C# though, rather than your personal experience with companies that were using it. If I judged every single company i worked at/interacted with, that uses NodeJs, I'd think that every single Node dev is a 13 year old child with no real experience but who think's he's the hottest shit. That has nothing to do with Node and doesn't really describe _all_ the companies out there.
theshrike79 11mo ago
C# is massive in (mobile) gaming because of Unity. And when the front-end is C#, it only makes sense to do the backend in .NET too so you can share classes easily.
- tracker1 11mo ago
  I only partly agree with you... if you're talking a web api, then code generation can go a long way with an OpenAPI doc file.
  - theshrike79 11mo ago
    Yea, but then the other end has to serialise the HTTP API stuf to a typed object on their end. It's a lot easier when you have a single shared library you can just NuGet into both sides, client and server and then use the same correctly typed PlayerDTO for both.
    - tracker1 11mo ago
      I don't know about you, but when I code-gen from an OpenAPI doc, I get strongly typed object interfaces, so the serialization is in the box. No need to have a client distribution specifically, unless you want to wrap the generated client to make it easier to implement security layers. If I had to manually create a client, then I'd probably go back to WCF (CoreWCF) which, again makes it easy enough to publish a client. For WCF in particular, I used to have one project with all the interface definitions and a client-generator that would allow for an "easy" single connection string as opposed to the XML bloat that is typical for WCF defaults. All the same, you can definitely generate strongly typed clients to OpenAPI, provided the interfaces are well defined in the doc/generator/api.
parliament32 11mo ago
I think the key problem is that a large number of startups are shipping software in containers, and dotnet requiring a CLR is not particularly well-suited for containerization. It's like the old school Java JVM model. You have to ship a copy of the runtime with every container, and if you're doing proper microservices it's an awful lot of overhead. Yes I'm aware MS makes it easy to build containers and even single executables, but languages that compile down to an ELF are pretty much a requirement once your deployments are over the 10k containers mark.
- paride5745 11mo ago
  Exactly this point. Go and Rust produce native binaries, I wish C# had an official native compiler without the big runtime needs of .Net.
  - cachius 11mo ago
    You might want to read https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/deploying/native-aot/ https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/deploying/nati... Publishing your app as Native AOT produces an app that's self-contained and that has been ahead-of-time (AOT) compiled to native code. Native AOT apps have faster startup time and smaller memory footprints. These apps can run on machines that don't have the .NET runtime installed.
    - 4rt 11mo ago
      They're self contained and native, but they're still massive. There's been some work on CoreRT and a general thrust to remove all dependencies on any reflection (so that all metadata can be stripped) and to get tree-shaking working (e.g. in Blazor WASM). It seems like in general they're going in this direction.
      - greener_grass 11mo ago
        Smaller is better, of course, but I've never found the size of .NET binaries to be an issue. What problems does this cause?
dijit 11mo ago
> I wish .NET was more popular among startups C# is extremely popular in Western/Northern Europe. (Sweden/Denmark/Germany ironically in particular). These are real Microsoft strongholds.
- thewebguyd 11mo ago
  Australia too. But startups aside, pretty much any company of significant size outside of the bay area/silicon valley is a Microsoft stronghold. It's an anomaly, not the norm, that so many companies in SV are on other stacks. Even for the non-tech workers (Google Docs vs. MS Office, macOS vs Windows endpoints, Slack vs. Teams, Okta vs. Entra ID or Active Directory, etc.). When the entire enterprise's IT runs on Microsoft, you might as well pick an MS tech for the dev stack too.
nicoburns 11mo ago
> I wish .NET was more popular among startups, if only C# could get rid of the "enterpisey" stigma. I tried .NET and liked C# as a language. But even though the language and runtime are now open source, it seemed like a lot of the recommended libraries were still commercially licensed, which was an immediate nope from me. I've never encountered that in any other ecosystem.
- GiorgioG 11mo ago
  Recommended by whom? I've been doing .NET for 23 years (since the first beta) and I've never paid for a single library in any commercial project I've been part of.
  - runjake 11mo ago
    Not OP but I still run into paid libraries (eg Telerik) all over the place in projects.
    - tracker1 11mo ago
      I never liked their stuff myself, and generally avoided them.
      - runjake 11mo ago
        Same here, but "enterprise" dotnet developers generally seem to need "more help" and love this kind of stuff.
  - whizzter 11mo ago
    Moq, lots of PDF libraries, Avalonia, Automapper, MediatR, MassTransit,Telerik stuff,etc. I'm not inherently against it, we have a problem with opensource being asymmetrically underfunded and if people going commercial is the cost perhaps we've failed.
    - majora2007 11mo ago
mbesto 11mo ago
> I wish .NET was more popular among startups In my experience .NET/C# dwarfs pretty much any other framework in the SMB and there are WAY more software companies that aren't considered "startups" than those tagged as "startups".
- Lumping6371 11mo ago
  Yeah, but it's very likely you won't be working like a mule, or creating a bicycle with three wheels. How could oneself be innovative and top talent under such conditions?
  - mbesto 11mo ago
    I've seen plenty of innovative .NET/C# shops. They just don't have the "hip" factor to them.
  - mardifoufs 11mo ago
    It's mostly about pay too. And yeah some people want more exciting jobs and maybe even outlandish stuff like the ones you listed (regardless of the sarcasm!). Yes at the end of the day most software isn't super exciting, but it doesn't make a tech stack or platform where most of your job prospects would approximate to "working on some run of the mill, mega enterprise or SMB software project" any more attractive for devs. Especially when even its advocates somehow use that as an "upside". It might very well be for a lot of people! But it's also a massive turn off for others. I have never worked in a startup or big tech, and work on very concrete and critical products yet I'd very much rather work on even outlandish SV stuff (at least the pay is usually great and the job environment could be good!) rather than on some SMB CRUD or some generic backend service. If I don't have a choice I could do it but it's not super enticing.
    - mbesto 11mo ago
      For all of the "SV startups" that are working on hard tech problems (new DBs, LLMs, etc.) there are thousands of SV startup CRUD apps. Most SV tech stacks are romanticized when in reality they are just are all mostly some flavor of a MEAN stack that is building a CRUD. The allure is the lottery payout and a clean slate tech stack, not that the specific tech itself is used.
dzonga 11mo ago
I tried so many times to get into the .net ecosystem. I actually like f# have written a few toy things with it. but never could built anything substantial with it - as I would starting my own cement factory. same as c# - seems asp.net comes with a lot of stuff - but to use that stuff a lot of ceremony is baked in. with Ruby | Rails i'm one or two commands away from most things I need. I understand the language & the ecosystem.
- thiago_fm 11mo ago
  I'm a Ruby dev of almost 2 decades now doing C# and it's extremely fast to get a API with Swagger running from C#, a few mins tops. And this is if you spend just a little bit to learn it! Of course, if you expect a full FE+BE 'omakase' framework like Rails there isn't anything with the same weight. I began to see this as a plus, you actually don't need it all, and nowadays it's very modern to delegate auth to a service etc. I know it isn't DHH's PoV, but it makes it much easier to maintain, so you focus on writing business logic and do the FE in a widely supported framework like React, or use Microsoft stuff, your choice. The DTOs/DI and the typical .NET developer stuff isn't bad or hard to learn, most of it comes naturally when you think "What would a statically typed language need?" It's what allows C# code be very clean and easy to follow, where you know exactly what is available unlike Ruby that a lot of things are implicit and can get very nasty. After so many years debugging and improving Rails apps performance, I got sick of it and C# feels fresh. Then there's LINQ and a lot of language sugar that makes C# code really beautiful. I've done also some Java, and can easily vouch for C#. It's the Ruby of statically typed langs. And the speed, don't get me started. It's so fast.
zamalek 11mo ago
I was somewhat recently attempting to help my manager get a C# dev environment set up. He was used to doing everything the C/Java/JavaScript/Python/almost-every-language-under-the-sun way, and avoiding the "Microsoft way" of doing things created so many roadblocks. I had no idea that over the previous ~20 years I had been practicing a C# compiler summoning ritual and had become incredibly good at it. From the start I recommended installing Rider, VS, or VSCode, and that's eventually what worked - but having to drink the kool aid to that extent is fucking absurd. I personally won't be using it, given the choice, again. I don't like exceptions, but can live with them. I don't like null, but can live with it. Nuget is complete and utter garbage. You still have to resort to all forms of unreliable hacks in order to redirect it to a locally clone (and if you do use a feed to avoid that, good luck with getting the local cache to not be completely moronic). (Look, it certainly didn't help that the project itself was heavily enterprisey because the developers hadn't kicked those habits)
- stusmall 11mo ago
  >He was used to doing everything the C/Java/JavaScript/Python/almost-every-language-under-the-sun way, and avoiding the "Microsoft way" of doing things created so many roadblocks. What exactly does this mean? I haven't touched .NET in earnest in over 10 years. I know the ecosystem has evolved a lot since then, but I don't know how or in what ways
  - zamalek 11mo ago
    As far as I remember, cloning the project, sprinkling in some printfs and running it. He didn't want to use an interactive debugger. He was used to using the likes of nvm, uv, rustup, etc.
- neonsunset 11mo ago
  [dead]
- achandlerwhite 11mo ago
  Isn't it just a single file installation?
pier25 11mo ago
> I wish .NET was more popular among startups, if only C# could get rid of the "enterpisey" stigma There are plenty of real issues that are not the enterprise stigma. I built a backend web api this year with it and C# is fantastic. EF Core is truly one of the best ORMs I've ever used. That said, I regret that decision and won't be using it again for any new projects. Honestly it looks like Microsoft is distracted and doesn't really know what to do with .NET. Everywhere you look there are tons of half baked projects like Blazor, Identity or Kiota and progress in .NET is super slow. It's probably going to get worse now with all the AI crap.
- hvb2 11mo ago
  > That said, I regret that decision and won't be using it again for any new projects. Genuinely curious, why?
- shortrounddev2 11mo ago
  Just stick with the classic frameworks. Razor works great as does MVC WebAPI
  - pier25 11mo ago
    I tried Razor. It's mature, has tons of features, and it's very fast. But it only really solves rendering HTML. You will still need to integrate Vite somehow to use modern CSS, TS, etc. And if you do that, why even use Razor to begin with? Also, hot reload is garbage. C# will never get close in speed or features to something like Vite.
    - shortrounddev2 11mo ago
      If youre intent on writing everything on the frontend in javascript then you can just have a frontend app and use webapi MVC on the backend. Personally, in my personal projects, I find I iterate faster if I dont't write any javascript. Every page is just static HTML and any interaction is done via CSS (which you can do perfectly well in razor pages) or html forms. Managing page state is a huge time sink and IMO not worth it, but it's what pays the bills lol
tracker1 11mo ago
Agreed... 2 -> 3 was probably the most cumbersome for me, and 3 -> 5 had a few hiccups. But since 6, I haven't seen any huge issues.
damieng 11mo ago
If you use LINQ and have ever used areay Contains youre about to find out it's not going to be smooth. They knew about this for a year but decided coercing to span in an expression tree despite it being invalid wasn't worth fixing.
- HumanOstrich 11mo ago
  That's pretty vague. Do you have links to any articles or bug reports explaining the issue clearly?
vielite1310 11mo ago
As much as I love .NET. I would like to see the whole libraries ecosystem being sustainable again. A recent license changes from all my favorite libraries just made me hesitant using .NET for actually build a startup TBH
- sakesun 11mo ago
  I would also like to see the whole ecosystem being sustainable, financially :)
nu11ptr 11mo ago
IMO, C# is just a somewhat better version of Java (low bar) w/ first class Windows API support. I can't see myself ever adopting it for any real work. F# on the other hand seems a pretty awesome, terse and expressive language. Unfortunately, it is very unpopular (yet still hangs around).
- koyote 11mo ago
  > I can't see myself ever adopting it for any real work Why not? I see a lot of people saying they don't like it or won't use it but few of them list any reasons to, the ones that do raise issues from 20 years ago that have since been resolved. Maybe you should give it a try, you'd be surprised how productive the language is and how comparatively unproductive all other languages and ecosystems are.
  - nu11ptr 11mo ago
    I have tried it recently. It felt like I was coding Java. I realize "feel" isn't very objective, but I don't really like C-like languages in general. I like Rust, but only because of it's heavier FP-influence. C# is one of those languages where you don't mean to, but you can't help just creating tons of files/boilerplate/etc., which feels just like Java. Just my perspective, others obviously feel differently.
ddmma 11mo ago
Had the privilege to be consistent on C# development against the tide. NuGet was pretty generous during the years and VS26 is catching up with the small VS code frontend page cousin.
germandiago 11mo ago
As a person who looks always at Java and C sharp with curiosity, I am a bit divided. For me C#'s value is obvious in the frontend and also games compared to Java (except for mobile, where Java can be used but Kotlin seems best). But for the backend I always wonder if I should invest more on C# or Java as I go. Also, it worries me that Java is a memory hog, which C# seems not to be. I like to have lean server-side software, to the point that my usual approach has been to use C++ paired with Capnproto, but if I had to go with something a bit more high-level for web work, I am not sure. Currently I am investigating Clojure for non-critically-fast backend. It seems to be a lot of fun and since I am using https://fennel-lang.org/ https://fennel-lang.org/ (replacing part of my Lua code) and I expect https://jank-lang.org/ https://jank-lang.org/ to become something at some point, maybe it is worth to stick to it? How would someone that has more data than me compare Java vs C# in terms of performance as-in "what machine you need in the cloud" to do useful stuff, mainly for backend work, asynchronous, in terms of CPU and memory for both?
Loxicon 11mo ago
As a startup I tried .NET (it was .NET 8), and it was great. The problem was the education around .NET. So much DDD-this, Clean-that, CQRS-this, architecture-that. I get all that stuff is for enterprise with bigger teams. But there wasn't much content/guidance on how to build apps 'quickly' for startups. I am sure experienced .NET devs know this, but less experience .NET devs don't. I ended up dropping it because I could work faster in PHP.
glonq 11mo ago
Yeah I've been using non-.Net languages this week, and lamenting how much they suck in regards to smooth version management

by jitbit 11mo ago

oaiey 11mo ago

Can only confirm that. Such a smooth platform overall for web and API development. We use it with several 100 devs on it and the choice never failed us, neither in technology or hiring. And it is not that we have .NET gurus or anything.

balamatom 11mo ago
[flagged]
- LandR 11mo ago
  > Apropos, what do they do for fun? Odd question, but as a .NET developer myself Mountaineering, climbing, bouldering, going to gigs, playing pool, running, music festivals, gaming, photography, watching F1, watching NBA, eating out with friends... I'm not sure what the point of the question was ?
  - balamatom 11mo ago
    Ah, well, obviously the point of the question was to be odd for oddness's sake, as some form of bizarre, self-inflatory social ploy! I couldn't possibly have intended my question as a straightforward request for information about something, now could I? That would just be weirdy-weird, if people started asking each other questions for the purpose of receiving answers. Thanks for answering though.
    - LandR 11mo ago
      The reason I thought it was odd was that I've never seen any correlation between someones hobbies outside of work and what tech stack they use at work.
      - balamatom 11mo ago
        That's OK. I keep seeing a correlation between people's proneness to be like >The reason I thought it was odd was that I've never seen [it] and which tech stacks they feel more comfortable with.
- recursive 11mo ago
  > what do they do for fun? Play in a band, ride bikes, play video games. Sample size of one.
  - balamatom 11mo ago
    >Play in a band Cool, what genre?
    - recursive 11mo ago
      Rock mostly covers. I play keyboard. Trying to learn to sing. Progress is mixed.
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
larrik 11mo ago
As a counter-point, my company was original purely .NET, then added Python (and later JS). For us, hiring .NET is WAY harder than the other stacks. We get a lot more applicants in general, but almost zero that meet our standards. For Python roles we get way fewer applicants, but the average quality is much much higher than the .NET average. (JS is a whole other thing, and we frankly aren't as good at hiring there yet)
- zerr 11mo ago
  Do you measure that standard by leetcode?
  - larrik 11mo ago
    No, we don't do any coding tests, just discussions of what you've done and how deep your knowledge of your tools goes. .NET folks are far less likely to understand much beyond the syntax, nevermind the "why" of things (even WHY you need StringBuilder) or what a database index is, etc.
    - zerr 11mo ago
      Interesting. One would thing, "script kiddies" would be more common among Pythonistas. On the other hand, .NET might be more user-friendly, so that devs are productive even without the knowledge of what's going on under the hood. Kudos for the interview practices, that's similar to how I conduct as well :)

catlover76 11mo ago

> I wish .NET was more popular among startups, if only C# could get rid of the "enterpisey" stigma. There's that, but there's also the developer experience and functionality for people to run it on Mac and Linux. We have a small C# service that we run locally via Docker (which I think is usually the optimal setup anyways) and develop with VSCode. Since it's small, it has worked well. Would it work well if that was our main backend? Not sure. Wish I had the option of full Visual Studio on Mac for it regardless.

mrsmrtss 11mo ago
You can run .NET natively on Mac, if you wish. I would also recommend JetBrains Rider over VSCode; it works on Linux, Mac, and Windows and, in my opinion, is better than Visual Studio anyway.
- nozzlegear 11mo ago
  I use Rider† daily to write F# and C# on my Mac. It works great, I have no issues with it. It even handles the .NET Framework 4.8 code‡ that I maintain without any issues thanks to Mono. † And Neovim occasionally, but I mostly use it for Typescript or anything that isn't F#/C#. ‡ https://github.com/nozzlegear/shopifysharp https://github.com/nozzlegear/shopifysharp
phillipcarter 11mo ago
Rider is your option there, it's better than Visual Studio (I used to work on VS).
- starvar 11mo ago
  How is it so different than Visual Studio that you think it is "better"?
  - Deukhoofd 11mo ago
    I switched over entirely to Rider as well, in my experience it's far more performant, has a far smoother UX, has a lot more functionality for power users, and includes Resharper by default, giving you access to a bunch more powerful inspections and refactoring.

leetharris 11mo ago

> I wish .NET was more popular among startups, if only C# could get rid of the "enterpisey" stigma. Too hard to ignore the benefits of cross-stack gains in Typescript/Python. The C# native phone, Blazor, etc just isn't quite there yet. Tried it at the last company, and full stack TS was just so much easier to do. The reality is that the vast majority of startups don't make it. The #1 thing startups should be focusing on is hiring the right people and product velocity. TS just makes that easier in my experience.

phillipcarter 11mo ago
Is it though? Backends can be any language and there's a lot more variety there -- TS+node, Go, Python, Java. It's just .NET that's largely ignored for no real technical basis.
- cebert 11mo ago
  You can easily use the same types and libraries in your backend and frontend with TypeScript. It’s not at easy with dotnet.
  - phito 11mo ago
    OpenAPI and client generators solve this issue easily.
    - robertlagrant 11mo ago
      No, that's not true. If you share code like this then you can do things like put the same validation code in the frontend and the backend: frontend to give a nice user experience, and backend to protect the endpoint.
      - littlecranky67 11mo ago
        OpenAPI does support patterns for fields and nullables/non-nullables - that already gets you very far regarding validation. A decently sophisticated generator (which don't exist IMHO) would generate the validation code for your respective language.

vintagedave 11mo ago

.Net is also good as a platform for other languages. I recently started working with RemObjects, and you can compile languages like Java, Swift, Go and more (VB, Pascal) to .Net. Then, the whole framework and ecosystem is available. I'm liking it a lot. They have customers who are startups and the 'got to have tools' folk like having lots of languages since they can onboard people who know anything-not-C# and benefit from the .Net library.

sfn42 11mo ago
> they can onboard people who know anything-not-C# and benefit from the .Net library I don't get this mindset. I'd much rather have the new guy spend a few months getting used to a new language, than have an organization where everyone uses different languages. It's a nightmare a few years down the road when you have 20 different projects in 15 different languages and the people who built them are mostly gone. People are way too lenient with this stuff IMO. The goal of an organization should be to have one solution to each problem. For example we use .NET for backend and React for frontend. You don't need anything else. People love to talk about the right tool for the job, it's all BS. You can make pretty much any kind of website using react and pretty much any kind of backend using C#. The only reason to choose anything else is preference. And sure maybe you have some data science people who need python, thats fine. Just don't have one guy using Py, another using R and yet others using Matlab. That's just asking for trouble. Pick one, stick to it. If you're going to make a change then migrate everything. If it's not worth that then the new tool probably isn't such a big deal after all.
- netdevphoenix 11mo ago
  > People love to talk about the right tool for the job, it's all BS This sounds very close minded to me. It is certainly true that there exist tasks if not subdomains where some ecosystems are better than others. Using a hammer for everything might work for you if all your problems are nails. But that doesn't mean that all problems out there are nails
  - mhfu 11mo ago

randyburden 11mo ago

For what it's worth, the startup I currently work for is built entirely in C# and .NET, as was my previous employer. Both startups are based in the Dallas, TX area. Across both companies, applications were hosted on Azure and AWS using a mix of PaaS services and virtual machines running Windows and Linux. We've consistently found this stack to enable strong productivity and high-velocity release cadences.

DeathArrow 11mo ago
At my current workplace we use a mix of on premise servers and Azure but at former workplaces we deployed to Google Cloud and AWS.
miki123211 11mo ago
> Both startups are based in the Dallas, TX area. Aah that explains it. For some reason, .NET is extremely popular outside of major tech hubs (notably in Europe), where you're much more likely to work for (without loss of generality) Ikea than for Google.
- cheschire 11mo ago
  The Dallas area is a major tech hub. It’s just an older hub of major enterprisey type companies with major tech divisions there like Texas Instruments, AT&T, Bank of America, defense contractors like Lockheed, etc. Office Space took place there before the dotcom bust. Less enterprisey, but John Carmack and id Software also started there.
  - raw_anon_1111 11mo ago
    I lived and worked in Atlanta from 1996-2020. Those aren’t anymore tech companies than Delta, Home Depot or Coke by modern definitions. In all of the companies you named, software development is a cost center, not a profit center - follow the money. Who gets paid the most as a group at those companies? Those are enterprise companies.
    - 11mo ago

tinyspacewizard 11mo ago

Start-ups should strongly consider F#. It's a force multiplier when you have a small team of strong developers.

Xelbair 11mo ago
>startups should consider niche language with extremely limited hiring pool. sure, but only if you're doing something that actually demands it - and actual innovation - instead of usual 'lets repackage XYZ as SaaS and growthhack' strategy.
- dude250711 11mo ago
  It's good for, and I am not being sarcastic or snarky, justifying high pay and gate-keeping. Developers should set up more barriers for entry - look at doctors and lawyers.
  - stiiv 11mo ago
    I think I agree with you. When I was part of a growing F# team a number of years ago, everyone we hired was an enthusiast who just loved coding in F# and wanted an opportunity to do it professionally. It turned out that this love, combined with the constraints of the language, led to a super-clean and legible code base. The quality was (in my estimation) outstanding, and I was sad to leave it.
    - z500 11mo ago
      As an F# lover my heart sank at that "it turned out" at first. I'm glad someone got to live the dream somewhere haha
    - banashark 11mo ago
      I'm at my current company (actually writing mostly typescript and node services now) because of a YC "who's hiring" post that mentioned F# positions (bait and switch /s, but my experience lined up heavily with the team I ended up joining which didn't use F#).

olavgg 11mo ago

As a startup, what is it in for me to switch from Java, Spring Boot, Hibernate, Beam, Flink, Pulsar, Vault, KeyCloak ecosystem to C#.Net? Is the documentation better? Do I get better performance? Is the community larger and more stable?

littlecranky67 11mo ago
Yes.
Xelbair 11mo ago
Vault, Keycloak, Flink are language agnostic or there exist bindings for most popular languages. Documentation is vastly better compared to Java ones, it's like day and night, LINQ is vastly superior to anything that Java offered - but i haven't used java in a very long time. And every time i had to write java it felt like i went backwards in time by 5-10 years. If i remember right Java's webserver beats ASP.NET in performance benchmarks but .net's one performance is good enough that it does not matter until you hit really big usercount - and at that point you usually have to rethink your architecture anyways. But frankly .net is still mostly Microsoft Java but with better developer ergonomics in my opinion. It did shed a lot of overengineered OOP legacy from .net framework days though and we're seeing major performance improvements with every version.
- mrsmrtss 11mo ago
  >If i remember right Java's webserver beats ASP.NET in performance benchmarks That's not the case anymore. Kestrel is one of the fastest servers there is, and it beats every Java server out there.
  - hans0l074 11mo ago
    I do not have any benchmarks other than this[1] to refer to, but I work with Quarkus[2] and Java 25 LTS (just recently released) services deployed on AWS EKS and we are very happy with the performance (for mobile game backends) [1]: https://sharkbench.dev/web https://sharkbench.dev/web [2]: https://quarkus.io/ https://quarkus.io/

jgilias 11mo ago

Startups typically have the tech stack that the one man army tech co-founder set up on no budget. Apparently then .NET isn’t too popular for that!

thewebguyd 11mo ago
That's part of it, but is also weird because C# & .NET is probably one of the most productive single-developer stack you can choose. Modern ASP.NET handles so much for you it's a lot like Rails in that regard, you can get a lot done in it solo.

defraudbah 11mo ago

agree, but it lost the battle when windows was an exclusive platform for it, even when mono was rising in popularity

netol 11mo ago

The XML/config side of things just isn't for everyone. Sometimes Go's simplicity wins out.

neonsunset 11mo ago
It is as simple as what you get with Cargo, and possibly even more readable. .NET, unlike Go, has all needed management commands built into its CLI too: dotnet new {template}, dotnet add/remove package, dotnet sln add/remove, etc.
loldot_ 11mo ago
One of the big features in .net 10 is the ability to do `dotnet file.cs` to run an application, with package import and assembly attributes directly in the file.

brainzap 11mo ago

too much microsoft

masfoobar 11mo ago

I think the "confusing" aspect with C#, being part of the Microsoft eco-system, is that there are many smaller companies (and startups) that may have concern paying for such tools. To the uneducated, C# is linked to Visual Studio.. the IDE.. and the Community edition if free as long as you are a student, open-source, and individuals. Professional and Enterprise are paid. (Yes - there is Visual Studio Code) Again, I am looking at this from the uneducated. With the above, as well as "going with other Microsoft products" things start to get more expensive. Need a database - should it be SQL Server? Should it be Windows Servers? etc. Because of the above, I would not be surprised if Go is more popular especially for startups... alongside Linux, MySQL/Postgres, as well as other IDE or text editors. Sure.. I might agree that Visual Studio Code is suited for various programmers today. Not suggesting you are wrong in any way. It's just the amount of money spent on Windows/Microsoft for small companies is rather large, compared to other alternatives that are just as good.

CharlieDigital 11mo ago
> It's just the amount of money spent on Windows/Microsoft for small companies is rather large, compared to other alternatives that are just as good. This is a complete mis-perception about the modern ecosystem. We have a full team using C# at a series-C, YC startup with every developer on Macs (some on Beelinks and Linux). The team is using a mix of VS Code, Cursor, and Rider. We deploy to Linux container instances in GKE on Google Cloud running Postgres. There is no more tie in to Microsoft licensing than there is say for TypeScript. Yes, C# DevKit is licensed like VS, but if you don't need the features, then you can also use DotRush or just use the free C# Extension.
- martinald 11mo ago
  Totally agree. Ironically dotnet runs better on Linux/Mac systems in my experience. All our devs who use Windows for dotnet dev now use WSL2 as it matches production. We don't use any other 'commercial' Microsoft products like SQL Server or Azure. All postgres/redis/etc and deploy onto docker containers.
  - 11mo ago

CharlieDigital 11mo ago

I'm at a series-C, YC startup. We made a switch from TypeScript to C# two months back. Now we have a team of over a dozen backend engineers working on C# transitioning from TypeScript. 90% are working with C# for the first time. (We are still hiring backend C# engs!) I can say that it has gone waaaaaay smoother than anyone would have thought. This is a decision (language switch) that the team has been putting off for a long time and simply suffering through some big time jank and complexity with TypeScript (yes, TS at scale becomes complex in a very different way from C# because it becomes complex at the tooling layer in an "unbounded" way whereas C#'s language complexity is "bounded"). Indeed, I think more teams should give C# a shot. My own experience is that C# and TypeScript at a language level are remarkably alike[0] that if you know one well, you can probably quickly learn the other. But the C# ecosystem tooling is more cohesive, easier to grok, and less fickle compared to JS/TS (as is the case with Go, Java, etc. as well). There still remains a lot of mis-perceptions about C# and .NET in general and I think that many startups should spend the time to give EF Core a shot and realize how every option in JS-land ends up feeling like a toy. EF Core itself is worth the price of admission, IMO. [0] https://typescript-is-like-csharp.chrlschn.dev/ https://typescript-is-like-csharp.chrlschn.dev/

fud101 11mo ago
So should I learn C# by learning Typescript? Does that make sense?
- stanac 11mo ago
  Not really, you should learn Typescript by learning JavaScript first. Then consider learning C#. Or if you want to focus on the back end side learn C# and skip TS/JS. They are created by the same person but they are very different in my opinion. TypeScript is "a tool" for JS, it is possible to compile without errors but still fail in runtime (e.g. wrong object type returned from API), on the other hand parsing JSON with C# will give you correct object type, it may fail if some properties are missing but it will fail at parsing call, not further down when you try to use missing property. In other words typing is not glued on top of the language it's core of the language.
- 11mo ago

christophilus 11mo ago

I really liked working with C#. I spent 15 years or so with it and found it very productive. But no; I don’t miss the culture of C# / Microsoft shops at all.

mexicocitinluez 11mo ago
> culture of C# / Microsoft shops at al What do you mean?
- array_key_first 11mo ago
  I worked at a Microsoft shop, and this was my experience. 1. Process, process, and more process. Doing anything required layers of management approval. Trivial tasks become month long, or even years long, processes. 2. You have no power or agency. Something is broken? You're a developer, you should be able to fix it right? No. Broken things stay broken. You swim in your lane and keep your head down. Mediocrity is the goal. 3. Optimization doesn't exist. If a process is manual and takes you, a developer, 10 hours, then that's what it is. Nobody gives a flying fuck about tooling. Nobody cares if you spend 50% of your dev time doing random stuff. And if you even dare try to fix it, you will be told it's impossible and you're wasting your time. 4. Management is king. You will have to lie to them. You will have to spend time re-entering the same data in 5 different places so they can read it conveniently. You will have to make Excel workbooks. You will have to dumb things down, and then dumb them down again, and again. Everything is about Jira... Unless they're a really high up manager, in which case you have to take whatever is in Jira and put it in a word doc and send it to them, because they don't know how to open Jira.
  - atraac 11mo ago
    Those things have nothing to do with C# though, rather than your personal experience with companies that were using it. If I judged every single company i worked at/interacted with, that uses NodeJs, I'd think that every single Node dev is a 13 year old child with no real experience but who think's he's the hottest shit. That has nothing to do with Node and doesn't really describe _all_ the companies out there.

theshrike79 11mo ago

C# is massive in (mobile) gaming because of Unity. And when the front-end is C#, it only makes sense to do the backend in .NET too so you can share classes easily.

tracker1 11mo ago
I only partly agree with you... if you're talking a web api, then code generation can go a long way with an OpenAPI doc file.
- theshrike79 11mo ago
  Yea, but then the other end has to serialise the HTTP API stuf to a typed object on their end. It's a lot easier when you have a single shared library you can just NuGet into both sides, client and server and then use the same correctly typed PlayerDTO for both.
  - tracker1 11mo ago
    I don't know about you, but when I code-gen from an OpenAPI doc, I get strongly typed object interfaces, so the serialization is in the box. No need to have a client distribution specifically, unless you want to wrap the generated client to make it easier to implement security layers. If I had to manually create a client, then I'd probably go back to WCF (CoreWCF) which, again makes it easy enough to publish a client. For WCF in particular, I used to have one project with all the interface definitions and a client-generator that would allow for an "easy" single connection string as opposed to the XML bloat that is typical for WCF defaults. All the same, you can definitely generate strongly typed clients to OpenAPI, provided the interfaces are well defined in the doc/generator/api.

parliament32 11mo ago

I think the key problem is that a large number of startups are shipping software in containers, and dotnet requiring a CLR is not particularly well-suited for containerization. It's like the old school Java JVM model. You have to ship a copy of the runtime with every container, and if you're doing proper microservices it's an awful lot of overhead. Yes I'm aware MS makes it easy to build containers and even single executables, but languages that compile down to an ELF are pretty much a requirement once your deployments are over the 10k containers mark.

paride5745 11mo ago
Exactly this point. Go and Rust produce native binaries, I wish C# had an official native compiler without the big runtime needs of .Net.
- cachius 11mo ago
  You might want to read https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/deploying/native-aot/ https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/deploying/nati... Publishing your app as Native AOT produces an app that's self-contained and that has been ahead-of-time (AOT) compiled to native code. Native AOT apps have faster startup time and smaller memory footprints. These apps can run on machines that don't have the .NET runtime installed.
  - 4rt 11mo ago
    They're self contained and native, but they're still massive. There's been some work on CoreRT and a general thrust to remove all dependencies on any reflection (so that all metadata can be stripped) and to get tree-shaking working (e.g. in Blazor WASM). It seems like in general they're going in this direction.
    - greener_grass 11mo ago
      Smaller is better, of course, but I've never found the size of .NET binaries to be an issue. What problems does this cause?

dijit 11mo ago

> I wish .NET was more popular among startups C# is extremely popular in Western/Northern Europe. (Sweden/Denmark/Germany ironically in particular). These are real Microsoft strongholds.

thewebguyd 11mo ago
Australia too. But startups aside, pretty much any company of significant size outside of the bay area/silicon valley is a Microsoft stronghold. It's an anomaly, not the norm, that so many companies in SV are on other stacks. Even for the non-tech workers (Google Docs vs. MS Office, macOS vs Windows endpoints, Slack vs. Teams, Okta vs. Entra ID or Active Directory, etc.). When the entire enterprise's IT runs on Microsoft, you might as well pick an MS tech for the dev stack too.

nicoburns 11mo ago

> I wish .NET was more popular among startups, if only C# could get rid of the "enterpisey" stigma. I tried .NET and liked C# as a language. But even though the language and runtime are now open source, it seemed like a lot of the recommended libraries were still commercially licensed, which was an immediate nope from me. I've never encountered that in any other ecosystem.

GiorgioG 11mo ago
Recommended by whom? I've been doing .NET for 23 years (since the first beta) and I've never paid for a single library in any commercial project I've been part of.
- runjake 11mo ago
  Not OP but I still run into paid libraries (eg Telerik) all over the place in projects.
  - tracker1 11mo ago
    I never liked their stuff myself, and generally avoided them.
    - runjake 11mo ago
      Same here, but "enterprise" dotnet developers generally seem to need "more help" and love this kind of stuff.
- whizzter 11mo ago
  Moq, lots of PDF libraries, Avalonia, Automapper, MediatR, MassTransit,Telerik stuff,etc. I'm not inherently against it, we have a problem with opensource being asymmetrically underfunded and if people going commercial is the cost perhaps we've failed.
  - majora2007 11mo ago

mbesto 11mo ago

> I wish .NET was more popular among startups In my experience .NET/C# dwarfs pretty much any other framework in the SMB and there are WAY more software companies that aren't considered "startups" than those tagged as "startups".

Lumping6371 11mo ago
Yeah, but it's very likely you won't be working like a mule, or creating a bicycle with three wheels. How could oneself be innovative and top talent under such conditions?
- mbesto 11mo ago
  I've seen plenty of innovative .NET/C# shops. They just don't have the "hip" factor to them.
- mardifoufs 11mo ago
  It's mostly about pay too. And yeah some people want more exciting jobs and maybe even outlandish stuff like the ones you listed (regardless of the sarcasm!). Yes at the end of the day most software isn't super exciting, but it doesn't make a tech stack or platform where most of your job prospects would approximate to "working on some run of the mill, mega enterprise or SMB software project" any more attractive for devs. Especially when even its advocates somehow use that as an "upside". It might very well be for a lot of people! But it's also a massive turn off for others. I have never worked in a startup or big tech, and work on very concrete and critical products yet I'd very much rather work on even outlandish SV stuff (at least the pay is usually great and the job environment could be good!) rather than on some SMB CRUD or some generic backend service. If I don't have a choice I could do it but it's not super enticing.
  - mbesto 11mo ago
    For all of the "SV startups" that are working on hard tech problems (new DBs, LLMs, etc.) there are thousands of SV startup CRUD apps. Most SV tech stacks are romanticized when in reality they are just are all mostly some flavor of a MEAN stack that is building a CRUD. The allure is the lottery payout and a clean slate tech stack, not that the specific tech itself is used.

dzonga 11mo ago

I tried so many times to get into the .net ecosystem. I actually like f# have written a few toy things with it. but never could built anything substantial with it - as I would starting my own cement factory. same as c# - seems asp.net comes with a lot of stuff - but to use that stuff a lot of ceremony is baked in. with Ruby | Rails i'm one or two commands away from most things I need. I understand the language & the ecosystem.

thiago_fm 11mo ago
I'm a Ruby dev of almost 2 decades now doing C# and it's extremely fast to get a API with Swagger running from C#, a few mins tops. And this is if you spend just a little bit to learn it! Of course, if you expect a full FE+BE 'omakase' framework like Rails there isn't anything with the same weight. I began to see this as a plus, you actually don't need it all, and nowadays it's very modern to delegate auth to a service etc. I know it isn't DHH's PoV, but it makes it much easier to maintain, so you focus on writing business logic and do the FE in a widely supported framework like React, or use Microsoft stuff, your choice. The DTOs/DI and the typical .NET developer stuff isn't bad or hard to learn, most of it comes naturally when you think "What would a statically typed language need?" It's what allows C# code be very clean and easy to follow, where you know exactly what is available unlike Ruby that a lot of things are implicit and can get very nasty. After so many years debugging and improving Rails apps performance, I got sick of it and C# feels fresh. Then there's LINQ and a lot of language sugar that makes C# code really beautiful. I've done also some Java, and can easily vouch for C#. It's the Ruby of statically typed langs. And the speed, don't get me started. It's so fast.

zamalek 11mo ago

I was somewhat recently attempting to help my manager get a C# dev environment set up. He was used to doing everything the C/Java/JavaScript/Python/almost-every-language-under-the-sun way, and avoiding the "Microsoft way" of doing things created so many roadblocks. I had no idea that over the previous ~20 years I had been practicing a C# compiler summoning ritual and had become incredibly good at it. From the start I recommended installing Rider, VS, or VSCode, and that's eventually what worked - but having to drink the kool aid to that extent is fucking absurd. I personally won't be using it, given the choice, again. I don't like exceptions, but can live with them. I don't like null, but can live with it. Nuget is complete and utter garbage. You still have to resort to all forms of unreliable hacks in order to redirect it to a locally clone (and if you do use a feed to avoid that, good luck with getting the local cache to not be completely moronic). (Look, it certainly didn't help that the project itself was heavily enterprisey because the developers hadn't kicked those habits)

stusmall 11mo ago
>He was used to doing everything the C/Java/JavaScript/Python/almost-every-language-under-the-sun way, and avoiding the "Microsoft way" of doing things created so many roadblocks. What exactly does this mean? I haven't touched .NET in earnest in over 10 years. I know the ecosystem has evolved a lot since then, but I don't know how or in what ways
- zamalek 11mo ago
  As far as I remember, cloning the project, sprinkling in some printfs and running it. He didn't want to use an interactive debugger. He was used to using the likes of nvm, uv, rustup, etc.
neonsunset 11mo ago
[dead]
achandlerwhite 11mo ago
Isn't it just a single file installation?

pier25 11mo ago

> I wish .NET was more popular among startups, if only C# could get rid of the "enterpisey" stigma There are plenty of real issues that are not the enterprise stigma. I built a backend web api this year with it and C# is fantastic. EF Core is truly one of the best ORMs I've ever used. That said, I regret that decision and won't be using it again for any new projects. Honestly it looks like Microsoft is distracted and doesn't really know what to do with .NET. Everywhere you look there are tons of half baked projects like Blazor, Identity or Kiota and progress in .NET is super slow. It's probably going to get worse now with all the AI crap.

hvb2 11mo ago
> That said, I regret that decision and won't be using it again for any new projects. Genuinely curious, why?
shortrounddev2 11mo ago
Just stick with the classic frameworks. Razor works great as does MVC WebAPI
- pier25 11mo ago
  I tried Razor. It's mature, has tons of features, and it's very fast. But it only really solves rendering HTML. You will still need to integrate Vite somehow to use modern CSS, TS, etc. And if you do that, why even use Razor to begin with? Also, hot reload is garbage. C# will never get close in speed or features to something like Vite.
  - shortrounddev2 11mo ago
    If youre intent on writing everything on the frontend in javascript then you can just have a frontend app and use webapi MVC on the backend. Personally, in my personal projects, I find I iterate faster if I dont't write any javascript. Every page is just static HTML and any interaction is done via CSS (which you can do perfectly well in razor pages) or html forms. Managing page state is a huge time sink and IMO not worth it, but it's what pays the bills lol

tracker1 11mo ago

Agreed... 2 -> 3 was probably the most cumbersome for me, and 3 -> 5 had a few hiccups. But since 6, I haven't seen any huge issues.

damieng 11mo ago

If you use LINQ and have ever used areay Contains youre about to find out it's not going to be smooth. They knew about this for a year but decided coercing to span in an expression tree despite it being invalid wasn't worth fixing.

HumanOstrich 11mo ago
That's pretty vague. Do you have links to any articles or bug reports explaining the issue clearly?

vielite1310 11mo ago

As much as I love .NET. I would like to see the whole libraries ecosystem being sustainable again. A recent license changes from all my favorite libraries just made me hesitant using .NET for actually build a startup TBH

sakesun 11mo ago
I would also like to see the whole ecosystem being sustainable, financially :)

nu11ptr 11mo ago

IMO, C# is just a somewhat better version of Java (low bar) w/ first class Windows API support. I can't see myself ever adopting it for any real work. F# on the other hand seems a pretty awesome, terse and expressive language. Unfortunately, it is very unpopular (yet still hangs around).

koyote 11mo ago
> I can't see myself ever adopting it for any real work Why not? I see a lot of people saying they don't like it or won't use it but few of them list any reasons to, the ones that do raise issues from 20 years ago that have since been resolved. Maybe you should give it a try, you'd be surprised how productive the language is and how comparatively unproductive all other languages and ecosystems are.
- nu11ptr 11mo ago
  I have tried it recently. It felt like I was coding Java. I realize "feel" isn't very objective, but I don't really like C-like languages in general. I like Rust, but only because of it's heavier FP-influence. C# is one of those languages where you don't mean to, but you can't help just creating tons of files/boilerplate/etc., which feels just like Java. Just my perspective, others obviously feel differently.

ddmma 11mo ago

Had the privilege to be consistent on C# development against the tide. NuGet was pretty generous during the years and VS26 is catching up with the small VS code frontend page cousin.

germandiago 11mo ago

As a person who looks always at Java and C sharp with curiosity, I am a bit divided. For me C#'s value is obvious in the frontend and also games compared to Java (except for mobile, where Java can be used but Kotlin seems best). But for the backend I always wonder if I should invest more on C# or Java as I go. Also, it worries me that Java is a memory hog, which C# seems not to be. I like to have lean server-side software, to the point that my usual approach has been to use C++ paired with Capnproto, but if I had to go with something a bit more high-level for web work, I am not sure. Currently I am investigating Clojure for non-critically-fast backend. It seems to be a lot of fun and since I am using https://fennel-lang.org/ https://fennel-lang.org/ (replacing part of my Lua code) and I expect https://jank-lang.org/ https://jank-lang.org/ to become something at some point, maybe it is worth to stick to it? How would someone that has more data than me compare Java vs C# in terms of performance as-in "what machine you need in the cloud" to do useful stuff, mainly for backend work, asynchronous, in terms of CPU and memory for both?

Loxicon 11mo ago

As a startup I tried .NET (it was .NET 8), and it was great. The problem was the education around .NET. So much DDD-this, Clean-that, CQRS-this, architecture-that. I get all that stuff is for enterprise with bigger teams. But there wasn't much content/guidance on how to build apps 'quickly' for startups. I am sure experienced .NET devs know this, but less experience .NET devs don't. I ended up dropping it because I could work faster in PHP.

glonq 11mo ago

Yeah I've been using non-.Net languages this week, and lamenting how much they suck in regards to smooth version management