I've been using C# with recent features like Function Pointers, [UnmanagedCallersOnly], Dotnet Native Exports, etc
Have been writing C# to interact with C/C++ and publishing C ABIs as static/shared libs that are natively compiled
My mind has been absolutely blown with what modern .NET and C# are capable of doing in terms of low level/systems program and interop with C/C++/Rust etc.
The performance and object sizes are killer too.
I think most people don't know or think C#/.NET are capable of this
Can envision a not so distant future where C# is a common choice for places when you'd typically reach for C++
Also, the folks on the .NET Interop team are all super friendly and willing to have a conversation with you or answer questions. My experiences with the whole .NET organization at MS as a random person has been nothing short of shockingly pleasant.
However, the build/package system for this is still a complete mess if you want to target more than one architecture; I've spent much of the week looking at the question of how to make cross-platform assembly A depend on platform-specific assembly B, where B is one of B-win or B-mac, and it seems to require carefully hand building B into a nuget package.
I'm coming to appreciate msbuild, though. Or maybe that's Stockholm syndrome.
I second MSBuild as one of the best build systems I’ve had to work with. It absolutely has a learning curve but once you “get” how projects are evaluated and executed then you can start writing your own targets to do whatever you want.
MSBuild is very poorly documented. MSBuild is really not that good compared to what you get in FOSS land. I favor CMake over it, and personally I very much dislike CMake. The main thing in favor of CMake is you get cross platform.
The "core" of msbuild - targers, items, properties - is well documented. The actual work in normal cases is done by the vast hinterland of pre defined targets, and it's those that are badly documented. I've wasted several days reverse engineering 'ProjectReference' and only just found its detailed documentation. Fortunately you can read the source; unfortunately when you have to.
I think making it open source has come with a cultural change that's still propagating. It means not just defining the "Microsoft way" to do things but coping with myriad use cases turning up in the issue tracker.
If you think the "core" is well documented, link me the documentation which lays out all the built in targets involved in a standard c# project. Or even just a doc which describes the differences between PreBuildEvent, BeforeBuild, BeforeCompile, etc. As far as I can tell, this only exists as occasional comments in the .targets file. Msbuild documentation is horrible, without exception. When they occasionally document something it tends to miss half the optional flags and they never link the source code so it's up to you to find and correct it.
Actually it was already there in J++, and now we have Oracle trying to add back what Sun killed in 2000, with keeping 26 years of history running, it is ironic how some things turn around.
the new slim SDK style csproj and the dotnet command replacement (maybe wrapper) for msbuild are great addition to come with .NET Core a while back. I think MSBuild and nuget are great compared to my experiences with linux rpm libwhatever or npm. I have worked on some moderately sized code bases
(10s not 100s of projects in a solutions) and compile times stayed fairly reasonable.
I think the big downside is that the industry still thinks of .NET as stuck in .NET 2.0 or something, from my casual browsing that .NET is a skill not C#. Regardless,
I'm getting kind of excited for .NET 6 on official release, and doing the migration of all our apps off framework to the latest and getting some getting the new lang version.
I would also be excited, unfortunely in what concerns Web development we never do everything from scratch, rather build on top of Sitecore, SharePoint, Dynamics, while destop stuff always ends up having some 3rd party commercial components like Telerik, ComponentOne, Office or VS Plugins,...
I really like C# as a language, but as a Linux programmer, I found it difficult to install the dotnet sdk without the root permission. With that barrier, I can't recommend C# over Java, D or Go which are much easier to install.
The lack of the ICU library. As you mention it, I searched around and found setting "export DOTNET_SYSTEM_GLOBALIZATION_INVARIANT=true" could solve the problem. I stand corrected. Nonetheless, adding an env variable is still an extra step especially when the dotnet cli doesn't tell you what to do. An enduser has to google around to find the answer.
The OP is complaining about needing root to satisfy som third-party library dependency (libicu) when installing the .NET SDK outside the system package-manager, with the tarball only.
I think that’s a pretty far fetched complaint. There are tons of software out there on Linux which will break if you don’t satisfy their dependencies.
I’m sure the OpenJDK-tarball has some system-wide dependencies too (libssl?), but you can’t tell that because you probably installed it as root, using a package-manager instead.
If you do the same with the .NET SDK (use root, install via package-manager) you will find everything working equally smooth.
I generally do install JDKs as root from the system's package manager. This is primarily due to the system integration that it provides.
However, I often keep a collection of older versions and different patch levels in my home directory. These work fine for testing with the non-openjdk distributions for compatibility purposes.
I wasn't familiar with the icu library issue, so maybe it is something straightforward, but it seems odd that the fix was an env var. I certainly wouldn't say something like "welcome to linux" because of a scenario like this.
Have you installed jdk before? I installed jdk quite a few times without root and never had a problem. Jdk only depends on essential system libraries like libc. It ships other necessary libraries in the tar-ball. Do you have a reference to your claim that Java requires libssl?
You don’t need to install the SDK to run a dotnet core app. They can ship what’s required to run and there’s even single executable options now as well.
One caveat: If you ship a self contained app you often end up with 200MB of assemblies to ship. and the single file executables tend to load very slowly. It's basically an archive that first gets extracted and then executed. I had to give that up with a recent app because it was just too slow.
This hasn't actually been the case since dotnet Core 2.
Since dotnet Core 3, you can use assembly trimming to remove unused assemblies. That results in a package of around 10MB for a Hello World app, or more like 40-70MB for large, real-world apps.
From dotnet 5 there is also member trimming, which will trim unused parts of assemblies, which will further reduce the size. I haven't used this yet, but Microsoft claim it can result in packages 5x smaller than with assembly trimming, e.g. only 2MB for a Hello World app.
There is also AOT compilation, but I wouldn't hold my breath on seeing that become production-ready any time soon (Microsoft have been hyping it and saying it's "coming soon" for 10 years or so).
I just tried it on a small project of mine. It's 955 lines of C#[0], 6 dependencies, already configured for publishing a single file, self contained, for win-x64, ready to run. I built in release mode with publish trimmed, and trim mode set to link. The final size of the binary is 24.6 MB (not counting CLR DLLs), with a build time of 23.2[1] seconds.
I also have a Rust version of the project. 710 lines of Rust[0], 128 total dependencies in the tree, building in release mode with the MSVC Windows compiler. Final size of the binary is 2.29 MB, build time of 22.2[1] seconds.
Things are not great when your build times rival Rust's, and the output is slower and an order of magnitude bigger.
[0] Note that the C# version does have more robust handling when writing its output file than the Rust version, which adds couple dozen lines. Also the style conventions for brackets puts opening brackets on a new line for C#, the same line for Rust.
[1] Measured with hyperfine configured to run "dotnet clean -c Release" and "cargo clean" before each run.
> Why would you exclude those in this comparison - they're already (guaranteed to be) installed on your windows targets?
Note that this is a stand-alone build; it doesn't require the runtime to be installed. With that in mind, you're right they should be included, which would increase the build size by 8.3 MB.
> How about linux/Mac targets?
I can't build a Mac target because I don't have a Mac. I just built for a linux-x64 target in WSL, and the resulting binary is 35.0 MB. The Linux build looks like it's packaged the CLR into the main binary instead of keeping them separate, which would account for the greater size.
I did do a benchmark with hyperfine, which gave a 25.5 second build time. However, this is on WSL1 building off and on to an NTFS drive, which has known performance issues.
> I think 20-30MB is quite good - puts it in the ballbark of golang.
I've never used Go, but my understanding is that the Go compiler is very fast but doesn't do as much in the way of optimizations. If that's the case, having a larger and slower binary compared to Rust would be expected before you get to the packaged runtime.
The issue I'm taking here is that doing a trimmed dotnet build is (in this case) giving the same build time as Rust, but is only doing some AoT compilation and dead-code elimination. Rust is already doing that in addition to a whole host of other optimizations.
From a user perspective, this feels like dotnet is giving me a worse end product for the same time taken. Especially given the Rust version wasn't harder to write than the C# version (in fact, due to bad documentation the C# version was harder).
> 2MB+ for rust actually sounds a bit big -that's stripped?
No, that is not stripped, and with the standard release profile.
Maybe this is better for command line and server stuff. The app I was building used WPF with Core 3. The regular size was 180MB if built as self contained. Trimming took off maybe 30 MB but build times were painfully long. And the initial load took around 30 secs or more on some machine.
I haven't used WPF in 10 years or so. Come to think of it, I haven't done any desktop stuff with .NET Core at all - wow, 180MB is pretty damn big!
Just took a look at my current project, which has several components: an ASP.NET web UI is 80MB, an ASP.NET API is 65MB, and backend services range from 40-55MB (these are all pretty complex, production-grade components).
Yes, this deployment option makes tradeoffs that are clearly more in line with the use case of pushing out long-running server applications to machines with minimal configuration, rather than for desktop user applications.
That’s my impression too. Seems these days in general desktop applications are more of an afterthought in the .NET world and most new features are built mainly for server stuff.
Of all the possible ways to handle toolchains on Linux, I'm quite happy with asdf[1]. I've successfully built stand-alone fsharp/csharp "Hello worlds" off of dotnet via asdf - but I've not used dot.net in anger.
I chiefly like asdf because I typically need at least two toolchains (with various versions for various projects) - eg ruby and nodejs, or python and nodejs.
> The performance and object sizes are killer too.
> I think most people don't know or think C#/.NET are capable of this
Take all of this amazing stuff and it also works on embedded/raspi4... I have been playing around with using C#8 to directly drive & sample GPIO. Who needs timer ICs when you have a busywait while loop checking the high res timer...
Also, don't forget that you can go open an issue or submit a PR to any of the major .NET repositories right now, and expect to have your work (assuming accepted) incorporated into an official .NET release within a year or so.
And tooling, etc. Check out visual studio 2022. Its available in preview now.
> Also, don't forget that you can go open an issue or submit a PR to any of the major .NET repositories right now, and expect to have your work (assuming accepted) incorporated into an official .NET release within a year or so.
Yes! They also publish videos of their design review discussions - I submitted a cryptography-related PR a while back, and it was really cool to watch my proposal being discussed, and then even cooler when my code made it into dotnet :)
> And tooling, etc. Check out visual studio 2022
Don't forget JetBrains Rider - I switched from VS a few years ago, and haven't looked back. VS is great too, but in terms of performance and stability, Rider kicks it to the curb (IMO).
> Who needs timer ICs when you have a busywait while loop checking the high res timer...
A lot of people are concerned about power usage these days, particularly if these things are running off a solar cell.
And these days, most embedded controllers include some kind of timer anyway. Micropython has a timer interface that interrupts into a python subroutine. I use this for application level routines interfacing with a hardware watchdog.
Why couldn’t you do the same thing with C#? Being worried about power is fine and all, but I’d rather build the application and then analyze the actual performance and power draw to determine the appropriate solution for power efficiency. I’m sure there’s some WFI (wait for interrupt) available that could be used to solve this.
I like C# as a language. It's boring and gets the job done. But I will say I was disappointed after trying to set up a C# development environment on Linux after having such a positive experience with the language on Windows. It sounded like it was a reasonable thing to expect to work since apparently Microsoft supports Linux these days, but I couldn't see it through. When the official editor (MonoDevelop) is abandoned for a proprietary version with no notice on the homepage or docs, and all that people recommend you instead is to "just install Ryder", which costs a large sum, it's hard to not just want to go back to a language that has a more open ecosystem.
Working with C# on Linux isn't too bad if you use VSCode. You have to do a bit more manual work and it's not as smooth sailing as with Visual studio or visual studio for Mac but it gets the job done. I used it to work on an Aspose Words api for a reporting tool.
Scott Hanselman has a couple of guides on his blog on how to get it up and running.
It is a repository of scripts to automatically build Microsoft's 'vscode' repository into freely-licensed binaries with a community-driven default configuration.
Actually several of those features exist since version 1.0, because the CLR was designed to support languages like C++ as well, so there was always a way to access them even those that are only exposed after 7, but yeah bad M$.
Apparently the remark I made to how people lose good tooling due to needless religious hate was lost in the crowd, oh well, better improve my English skills.
Have been writing C# to interact with C/C++ and publishing C ABIs as static/shared libs that are natively compiled
My mind has been absolutely blown with what modern .NET and C# are capable of doing in terms of low level/systems program and interop with C/C++/Rust etc.
The performance and object sizes are killer too.
I think most people don't know or think C#/.NET are capable of this
Can envision a not so distant future where C# is a common choice for places when you'd typically reach for C++
Also, the folks on the .NET Interop team are all super friendly and willing to have a conversation with you or answer questions. My experiences with the whole .NET organization at MS as a random person has been nothing short of shockingly pleasant.