
Google joins .NET Foundation as Samsung brings .NET support to Tizen - ickler8
https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/16/google-signs-on-to-the-net-foundation-and-samsung-brings-net-support-to-tizen/
======
mentat2737
Nice.

Now please make C# a first-class citizen in Android and start to migrate from
Java to C#.

~~~
geodel
Google have not made their own languages Dart/Go official to Android. Why
would they make languages other than Java a priority now?

~~~
patates
Dart doesn't have the adoption yet and has a different plan when it comes to
mobile (
[https://github.com/flutter/flutter](https://github.com/flutter/flutter) ).

I love Go, but it's not really a suitable language to do UI, or anything that
deals with data models.

C#, however, is a perfect replacement for Java, most of the times. I would say
"it's simply superior in every imaginable metric other than cross-platform
implementations of the compiler/VM" but that's just my opinion.

~~~
dom96
Why do you consider Go unsuitable for UI development?

~~~
patates
You can't have generic functions that can wrap data so you end up passing
concrete models or interfaces to views - no generic view-models for you. The
inflexibility of the type system isn't a big deal when you are working on
network applications or tools, but causes serious duplication when you do
anything that passes around concepts internally.

~~~
bsaul
i don't think generic is relevant to GUI. objective c didn't have generics,
and i don't think it mattered in any way when they built cocoa.

now generics is a problem of its own when working with data and algorithms,
but they managed to get along with it in the backend so far, so...

~~~
dagi3d
obviously it is doable, but that does not mean there aren't better solutions
today.

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oblio
Now we're cooking.

The technical steering groups is currently formed out of: Microsoft, Red Hat
(so input from the main Linux distro), JetBrains (input from the makers of
great tools for developers), Unity (one of the leading game engine makers),
Samsung (one of the leading mobile device makers) and now Google.

.NET should have a bright future. And hopefully this should push a few buttons
over at Oracle HQ so that Java catches up faster to C#.

~~~
skizm
Is Java currently behind C# in any capacity?

Not that a shot in the arm wouldn't be good for Oracle, but Java definitely
still reigns supreme at the moment, despite Oracle's involvement.

[http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/](http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/)

~~~
oblio
Java the language versus C# the language.

~~~
skizm
Same question. What advantages does C# the language have vs Java the language?
Do people perceive Java as playing "catch up" with other languages?

e: I only ask because I've always heard the opposite.

~~~
on_and_off
Pretty much everything that is in kotlin should have been in java for a while
IMO and some of these features are in C#

~~~
rubber_duck
Kotlin fixes some of Java issues but it still can't fix JVM design decisions
such as lack of value types (coming to JVM in what 5 years from now ?) and
messy native interop.

Java has some really fancy JIT compilers designed for servers but .NET is much
more AoT/native interop friendly with value types and reified generics, you
can get a lot closer to C++ like code with C# than with Java (avoiding GC with
structs, controlling memory layouts in collections, etc.)

------
veeragoni
Microsoft joins Linux Foundation and Google joins .NET foundation. what a day
:)

~~~
badloginagain
The thing I find really interesting here is that Microsoft is pulling down the
walls to it's garden and building bridges instead. It will be fascinating to
see how this plays out, because this is a tectonic shift in the development
landscape.

Props to Satya Nadella for having the gumption to lean into this strategy. I
was expecting a few token open-sourcish libraries as a giant marketing
campaign, but it looks like they're really committed to the idea.

------
brilliantcode
What an amazing year for Microsoft. It's nothing like Microsoft from 2006 or
1996.

Build 2016 is probably THE defining moment for developers that have previously
shied away due to their inherent closed, proprietary nature.

At least for me anyways, AWS seriously needs a killer IDE like Visual Studio's
tight integration with Azure.

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JBReefer
I like the laptop with a bunch of lovely Microsoft technologies, and then WiX.

Please, please die WiX. Imperative XML + non-deterministic execution order +
the worst error messages of the entire stack. I love C# and the CLR, but damn
WiX sucks.

~~~
chamakits
I haven't done a lot of 'Windows exclusive' development for a while, but
something like 6-8 years ago, I was making an installer for a small company
that up to that moment, they had to send someone over to spend a whole day
installing the software on client's machines.

I was strongly suggested to use WiX. I spent 2 months trying to get something
to work, but I wasn't able to get nothing truly useful to run. I remember
explicitly that something as simple as writing to the registry was proving
problematic. To make it worse, documentation was poor, and there wasn't much
of a community around it cause it was brand spanking new.

Two months in, without telling anyone, I decided to ditch it and use NSIS.
That day I had something that actually worked! Within 2 weeks I had something
that was running end to end, installing the software on the machine. The next
month was polishing, and testing/fixing for different versions of Windows.

I have no idea how things may have changed now, but if I tasked with making a
Windows installer today, I wouldn't even think twice about using anything
other than NSIS.

~~~
ygra
Can NSIS by now roll-back partially failed installations? That's to me the
biggest gripe I have as a user of such installers – whenever something weird
goes wrong you end up with a half-installed application of which you don't
know how to get rid of the pieces.

~~~
flukus
You delete the directory to get rid of the pieces.

~~~
ygra
Assuming it hasn't done a bunch of other stuff yet. While Microsoft recommends
that the install directory is the application bundle and programs should
confine themselves to it, that's hardly what many applications are doing.

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echelon
As a Java developer using Linux and Mac, I couldn't be happier. I would love
to see C# and .NET on Android. I'd be equally thrilled to use Microsoft tools
(so long as they're on Unix) to develop for it too.

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shaydoc
.NET is great... C# is a fantastic language. Apple, make it a first class
citizen for iOS also ;)

~~~
adamnemecek
What are some things that C# has over swift

~~~
mvitorino
LINQ and ability to interact with any IL compiled language (F#, VB). Also
async.

~~~
eggy
I prefer F# over C#, and I think it is a better competitor to Swift or Java or
Kotlin.

~~~
xorxornop
The important thing is CLR support. Everything else is just semantics.
(literally)

~~~
mvitorino
Semantics improves expressiveness which provides conciseness, which leads to
less code. Less code is generally less bugs (sure...arguable). But definitely
expressiveness is also often correlated to programmer happiness, which is
important in itself.

------
ocdtrekkie
Tizen supporting .NET is the interesting thing in this article to me. If
Microsoft got so far as getting UWP apps running on Tizen, Microsoft and
Samsung could potentially offer a pretty compelling offering against Android.

~~~
Grazester
Windows Phone had UWP no? Where developers were concerned it didn't offer them
anything compelling enough for that platform it seems. I think it would be
even less so on Tizen even.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Tizen has other traits that might be more appealing, like the fact that it's
open source. (And arguably, more open source than Android by far.) And if
Samsung chose to start pushing Tizen phones over Android phones... bear in
mind, Samsung is pretty much THE Android manufacturer, everyone else rides
their coattails. Samsung is maybe the only company that can upset the apple
cart as far as Google's concerned.

~~~
Grazester
Without the Google Play Store Samsung's phones without Android are not going
to sell.

~~~
dogma1138
In the west maybe not tho the Samsung store has tons of stuff.

FYI many if not most android phones are sold without the google store today in
emerging markets if you buy a <50$ in Africa you are not getting Google's App
Store.

~~~
GFischer
To be honest, everyone sideloads the Play Store anyways. Heck, they sell it
pre-sideloaded here in South America (and with pirated apps if you want them).

------
mr_overalls
What would be required to bring the CLR up to the JVM's legendary level of
engineering?

~~~
KirinDave
It's already there? The CLR is a well maintained and engineered system.

Why do you believe otherwise?

~~~
mr_overalls
At one time, the JVM had superior configurability - many more runtime options
for aggressive garbage collection, profiling, optimization, and debugging.

But maybe you're right - it's been a few years since I made a looked at the
comparison.

~~~
KirinDave
> At one time, the JVM had superior configurability - many more runtime
> options for aggressive garbage collection, profiling, optimization, and
> debugging.

I'm not sure that this actually implies it was a more robust and production
ready system. The JVM seems to be on a similar path of reducing somewhat how
much tuning is expected of operators. Certainly we do less of it now on Java 8
(although some of the defaults it sets are truly boneheaded).

------
flinty
So if you were to build a time machine and go back to 2004 and told some one
the following, which do you think they will believe:

Microsoft joins Linux foundation and has a seat on the board

Google joins .NET foundation

Trump is president of the United States

------
bborud
I've used Java since it was first launched and I've used it as a primary
language since 2003 (it took a while before it was usable for the stuff I was
doing). Although I like Java, I don't trust Oracle. They are not a well-
behaved citizen of the software world. So for the last few years I've been
eager to migrate away from Java.

I really hope Microsoft understand that if we made the move to C# they have a
brilliant opportunity to set the standard for how to behave.

(Meanwhile, I'm in the process of using Go for projects)

------
m3rc
Does this spell Google moving away just a little bit from Java in the future?

~~~
markdoubleyou
Jon Skeet (C# guru who works at Google, for those unfamiliar with C# rock
stars) was interviewed on Software Engineering Daily, and his response to this
question was basically, "uh, no." Google isn't shifting their focus away from
Java/C++ any time in the foreseeable future. (You might see improved support
for .NET Core in Google Compute Engine, though.)

[https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2016/09/20/cloud-
client...](https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2016/09/20/cloud-clients-with-
jon-skeet/)

~~~
m3rc
That's an interesting interview, thanks.

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Zigurd
IF Microsoft makes another run at phones, the should use Tizen with .NET. That
would be very much in the spirit of Android. Every Android OEM/ODM would know
how to port it, so it might pull along some 3rd party hardware makers. Most
importantly it would lose all the complexity of being Windows Everywhere while
still running key MS apps.

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alkonaut
They say Tizen TVs with .NET support will come in 2017. Does that mean older
devices will never support .NET? I couldn't find any information about that.

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phyushin
Tizen would be OK if you didn't have to use eclipse

~~~
Kipters
Well, now you can use Visual Studio

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johnnydoe9
I barely understand all this but I'm excited!

