Are there particular things about the ecosystem that you worry about (or have heard about)? Biggest complaint I would have is that it seems like many popular open source libraries in the .NET ecosystem decide to go closed source and commercial once they get popular enough.
(The amount of times I hear "the standard lib is great!" seems more to attempt to defend the plethora of commercial libraries, more than anything)
The community feels rather insular too? The 9-5 dayjob types with employers who don't understand or embrace open source? At my age I can respect that though
And is Postgresql a 2nd-class citizen? If so, your boss will tell you to use SQL Server surely?
I guess it's hard to get a grasp on the state/health of .NET as to me it seems 99.99999% of the code is in private repos companies, as it's not a popular choice for open source projects. Which itself seems like a proxy signal though
> And is Postgresql a 2nd-class citizen?
Microsoft maintains the Npgsql project[0] and I say that it is a very capable, feature rich adapter.
I have not used C# with SQL Server in almost a decade.
It is what it is but I wouldn't say its actually the fault of the language, especially now.
It serves many audiences so it can feel like the language is a jack of all trades and master of none (because it is) and because it is largely backwards compatible over its 20+ years of existence.
That said, I think people make a mountain out of a molehill with respect to keyword sprawl. Depending on what you're building, you really only need to focus on the slice of the language and platform you're working with. If you don't want to use certain language features...just don't use them?
I think it excels in a few areas: web APIs and EF Core being possibly the best ORM out there. For me, it is "just right". Excellent platform tooling, very stable platform, very good performance, hot reload (good, but not perfect), easy to pick up the language if you already know TypeScript[1]; there are many reasons it is a good language and platform.
[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/advanced-top...
VB.NET's Object was created to support interfacing with COM interop easier. VB.NET's one key niche versus C# for many early years was COM interop through Object.
C#'s dynamic keyword was more directly added as a part of the DLR (Dynamic Language Runtime aka System.Dynamic) effort spurred by IronPython. It had the side benefit of making COM interop easier in C#, but the original purpose was better interop with IronPython, IronRuby, and any other DLR language. That's also why under the hood C#'s dynamic keyword supports a lot of DLR complexity/power. You can do a lot of really interesting things with `System.Dynamic.IDynamicMetaObjectProvider` [1]. The DLR's dependency on `System.Linq.Expressions` also points out to how much further in time the DLR was compared to VB.NET's Object which was "just" the VB7 rename of VB6 Variant originally (it did also pick up DLR support).
The DLR hasn't been invested into in a while, but it was really cool and a bit of an interesting "alternate universe" to still explore.
[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.dynamic....
That's why I like it so much. And now, I can write mostly functional code.
>I think it excels in a few areas: web APIs and EF Core being possibly the best ORM out there
It's awesome for web stuff and microservices.
> It's awesome for web stuff and microservices.
Is it good at the wrong thing? Eg compare to strongly-typed query generators
> Is it good at the wrong thing?
Your original quote, verbatim:
> Eg compare to strongly-typed query generators
EF is precisely a code to structured query language (SQL) query generator and not a query to code generator.
.NET is a fantastic ecosystem. Has a decent build and dependency system (NuGet, dotnet run/build, declarative builds in XML). Massive standard library, with a consistent and wide focus on correctness, ergonomics, and performance across the board.
You can write everything in many languages, all on the same runtime: business logic in C#; hot paths interfacing with native libraries in C++/CLI; shell wrappers in PowerShell, document attachments with VB, data pipelines in F#.
I feel more people should use it, or at least try it, but sadly it is saddled with the perception that it is Windows-only, which hasn't been true for a decade (also, IMO, not necessarily a negative, because Windows is a decent OS, sue me).
In my experience it does not work very well outside of the sanctioned Linux distributions. Quirky heisenbugs and nonsensical crashes made it virtually unusable for me on Void. I doubt that's changed in the years that have since passed.
> not necessarily a negative, because Windows is a decent OS
Is a language runtime worth an operating system? I think that's a paradigm we left behind in the 1970s when the two were effectively inseperable (and interwoven with hardware!) I wouldn't expect someone to swap to using a Unix system because they really want a better Haskell experience.
I just don't see any actual interesting or meaningful reasons to care about .NET, I effectively feel the same way about it that I do about Go. Just not something that solves any problem I have, and doesn't have anything that interests me. Although effectively I did try it, so it's a moot point considering that's one of the outcomes you're wishing for.
It's open source. Did you follow the spirit of Linux to file a bug report of as much sense of the crashes as you could make? Most OSS only supports as many distros as people are willing to test and file accurate bug reports (and/or scratch the itch themselves and solve it). It seems a bit unfair to expect .NET to magically have a test matrix including every possible distro when almost nothing else does. (It's what keeps distro maintainers employed, testing other people's apps, too.)
It probably has gotten better since then, for what it is worth. .NET has gotten a lot of hardening on Linux and a lot of companies are relying on Linux servers for .NET apps now.
At the very least there are very tiny Alpine-based containers that run .NET considerably well and are very well tested, so Docker is always a strong option for .NET today no matter what Linux distro you want on the "bare metal" running Docker.
It has a bad rep because Microsoft could Microsoft as they do.