Ask HN: Why is .NET not popular with startups? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Why is .NET not popular with startups?

#51

Post by world32 » Sun, Jun 23, 2019, 5:42 PM UTC

Someone1234 wrote: post #37

jasode wrote: post #27

>What are you thoughts as to why .NET hasn't taken off at startups? To echo what others said... A lot of hot startups are founded by young college kids. They don't have money for expensive Visual Studio licenses to program in C# and .NET world. In contrast, the alternative dev tools like Java, Ruby, PHP were free. In college classes, they would have played around with free software instead of Microsoft. Microsoft cha…

> To echo what others said... Your post doesn't do that. Most other posts name other reasons (potentially legitimate ones), your "it is expensive" justification is inaccurate and doesn't echo most posts here. > Microsoft charged money in multiple areas of the stack: the compiler (VS) cost money, the database (MS SQL Server) cost money, and the operating system (Windows licenses) cost money. The C# compiler is free an…

You are clearly very bitter about this.

> The C# compiler is free and OSS.

Has this always been the case?

> .Net Core is available for Linux and MacOS.

A quick wikipedia search shows that .Net core was first released in June 2016, that only supports the view that microsoft has been very late to the game when it comes to open source languages and frameworks.

The original comment that you disagreed with says "Yes, MS later radically changed strategy by making their tools open source and more compatible on Linux.", but despite your hostility nothing in your post actually disagrees with that comment does it?

Re: Ask HN: Why is .NET not popular with startups?

#52

Post by nycdotnet » Sun, Jun 23, 2019, 5:46 PM UTC

We use .NET Core at Namely and we are generally super happy with it. About half of our new services are in C# with .NET core using protobufs/gRPC in Linux Docker containers on Kubernetes talking to Postgres, Redis, and Kafka; the other half are Go but otherwise same stack. That’s all free/open source stuff. .NET Core is super fast and has a generally pretty small memory footprint. It works great with our ELK stack monitoring tools, our perf analytics tools - all the same stuff our other apps running on Linux containers/k8s use - because it’s also running on Linux in Docker on k8s. Most of our .NET devs use Windows desktops because we support some legacy .NET apps too, but several of our .NET devs use Macs and either VS Code or vim to work on our .NET Core services; as far as I know, this works well for them. They certainly are fast with implementing stuff when asked.

Why isn’t it more popular if it’s super fast and works great on Linux? Well, I think it is true that there are some memories of startups wanting to avoid Microsoft tech; I think that cousins TypeScript and VS Code are in the vanguard here. But the fact is that there are still a handful of lego pieces that are still not around yet that would really help; for example, Kafka streams only works with JVM languages. MS just released an open source Spark client for .NET which had a JVM bridge layer. It would be really interesting if that were extended to allow arbitrary interoperability with the JVM.

Other than that, I think it’s getting there and it might take a few more years for things to sink in to common knowledge. .NET has only been fully open source and running on Linux for a very short time, relatively speaking, and I find it’s still common for people to be surprised when they hear it.

Re: Ask HN: Why is .NET not popular with startups?

#53

Post by karmakaze » Sun, Jun 23, 2019, 5:48 PM UTC

A practical reason:

.NET and dev tools weren't available or production grade on non-Windows platforms.

Historically, I have an aversion to MS tech since MS Java 1.1.

Re: Ask HN: Why is .NET not popular with startups?

#54

Post by DarkStar851 » Sun, Jun 23, 2019, 5:54 PM UTC

pryelluw wrote: post #12

TobbenTM wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it is free though! With .Net Core being Cross platform, I've actually yet to run it on anything else than Linux in production environments! Hosting is the same as any other technology, you just need a host to either run containers or the .Net artifacts directly. Lastly, I think it's unfair to throw SQL server into this comparison, as MySQL and PostgreSQL are perfectly supported with entity framework.

It has only been open source for a relative short amount of time when compared with other technologies like Node, RoR, etc. .Net has historically cost money while providing somewhat similar features as open source competitors. Its why MS was forced into open sourcing it. They could not compete anymore.

.NET itself has always been "free" (as in beer), it's just VS they made people pay for. They've had a community edition since VS2012 at least, possibly earlier but that's as far back as my brain goes.

The Community edition is pretty full-featured, it's only missing some TFS integration stuff, some test suite stuff and advanced profiling. I'd compare it to IntelliJ's free/pro model.

Re: Ask HN: Why is .NET not popular with startups?

#55

Post by sofaofthedamned » Sun, Jun 23, 2019, 5:58 PM UTC

nextos wrote: post #19

sofaofthedamned wrote: post #14

I'm a Linux guy - but have to say .net core has impressed me. Going back to the question - certainly in the UK it is massively popular. The company i'm at now is mainly .net, but moving to .net core, probably a majority of jobs in my area are using some flavour. To some extent I think old school .net is holding it back. Core however will get a lot of traction, nobody wants to pay the Windows tax when they don't need…

Same here. I think F# in particular is really appealing now that support in Linux is first class.

Yeah. I look at my company and their AWS bill which is huge - deploying .net core on Linux will save them so much money. I'd prefer golang but the difference is in the realms of noise.

Re: Ask HN: Why is .NET not popular with startups?

#56

Post by chrisgoman » Sun, Jun 23, 2019, 6:13 PM UTC

Microsoft "tax". Even if you are willing to pay for a license, all the terms & how much are very confusing and not worth dealing with. Developers would rather solve technical problems than deal with even 5 minutes of potential licensing issues. If you start working on .NET, you almost immediately think "license debt" (similar to technical debt)

Re: Ask HN: Why is .NET not popular with startups?

#57

Post by fj39dkf » Sun, Jun 23, 2019, 6:14 PM UTC

Every .NET developer I've worked with had to be painfully dragged out of the Microsoft world into the real one. It's just not worth the effort to hire people who solve problems by asking Microsoft to sell them the answer. Better to pick a technology where the talent pool has legitimately competent engineers.

Re: Ask HN: Why is .NET not popular with startups?

#58

Post by ch_123 » Sun, Jun 23, 2019, 6:28 PM UTC

I would question to what extent your .NET experience is truly non-applicable to something like Java or Python.

A corollary of this is that if a potential employer turns you down purely on the basis that your experience lies with a different tech stack - it’s quite likely that you’ve dodged a bullet (assuming we are comparing similar disciplines, e.g. they are looking for a backend developer and you have a lot of experience building backend services, just with a different stack)

Re: Ask HN: Why is .NET not popular with startups?

#59

Post by mattmanser » Sun, Jun 23, 2019, 6:51 PM UTC

TobbenTM wrote: post #7

BrentOzar wrote: post #2

In the past, it's been about budgets: Microsoft has an aura of money about it. The OS cost money, the good developer tools cost money, the database cost (a lot of) money. Startups are by definition cash-strapped. Some of that is changing - the developer tooling is getting free/cheap - but the rest of the stack (OS, hosting, database) still isn't free. (I know, the MS folks are going to say SQL Server Express Edition…

But it is free though! With .Net Core being Cross platform, I've actually yet to run it on anything else than Linux in production environments! Hosting is the same as any other technology, you just need a host to either run containers or the .Net artifacts directly. Lastly, I think it's unfair to throw SQL server into this comparison, as MySQL and PostgreSQL are perfectly supported with entity framework.

Last time I tried MySQL with the EF the performance was terrible, the EF was outputting a load of nested tables that were fine with SQL Server, but absolutely abysmal performance with MySQL. This was a while ago.

Have you used this personally, and do you have any scale? As there's 'supported' and there's good.

Re: Ask HN: Why is .NET not popular with startups?

#60

Post by pseudalopex » Sun, Jun 23, 2019, 7:01 PM UTC

DarkStar851 wrote: post #54

pryelluw wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has only been open source for a relative short amount of time when compared with other technologies like Node, RoR, etc. .Net has historically cost money while providing somewhat similar features as open source competitors. Its why MS was forced into open sourcing it. They could not compete anymore.

.NET itself has always been "free" (as in beer), it's just VS they made people pay for. They've had a community edition since VS2012 at least, possibly earlier but that's as far back as my brain goes. The Community edition is pretty full-featured, it's only missing some TFS integration stuff, some test suite stuff and advanced profiling. I'd compare it to IntelliJ's free/pro model.

They also made people pay for Windows.