.NET 8 Standalone 50% Smaller On Linux

Nowadays Windows only provides a nice SDK for C#. If you want to create apps in any other language you will need to use the Win32 ABI or some wrapper.

We’re switching to Go for concurrency. C and C++ for computation (though to be fair, we were already doing this with C# and the integration between them has always been great).

Our generalist language has become TypeScript however. Not because it’s great technically, but because it lets us share resources better which in term has made us much more productive in meeting our business needs.

I don’t think C# is bad, I also think it’s much better today than it used to be. If your use of it remains within what works well I think it’ll be hard to find a language with better tooling, but if your needs go beyond that you’re going to have to fight it a lot.

I do have a prototype project, and while it allowed to get going quickly, I found the remote debugging story useless, as Visual Studio 2022 SSH support is a steaming pile of garbage. (Doesn't use the windows systemwise ssh install, but some crappy library that only supports password auth, or some wonkny certificate format, and outdated ciphers, which is understandably disabled, wasted an hour and insecured the target machine, and gave up finally).

I used SQLite, and the System.Data.SQLite, because reasons (legacy). It is a bug ridden piece of work (on linux), with no sane way to contribute. Also it is useless on M1 Mac, as the author doesn't give a shit about compiling it for arm (or setting up a CI pipeline on github or gitlab for example, where it is supported).

Had plenty of problems with single file app bundle deployment, as much as it eased deployment initially, lots of libraries broke on it.

It has been working okay for us (in other former projects) generally well, but personally I am missing some things from the JVM, where VM tuning and monitoring and remote debugging are all a smoother ride in my experience.

Oh, and async broke the C# language (or rather the standard library) and killed the CLR interop with other languages, it was a big mistake to release it with these defaults. I really like F#, but async everything made it uselessly difficult in my opinion. But it has nothing to with .Net on Linux. It works, and is way better than the nodejs world, but I think more ideas should be copied from the JVM world to ease the Ops side, or they should be more clearly communicated.

I’m also still mad at them for competing against amazing stuff like ServiceStack (a real OSS project from the community, and the best way to run REST APIs I’ve ever seen) with “official” but worse stuff like ASP.NET Web API. They do this a lot, some OSS gets popular but instead of embracing it, they make a half-assed ripoff, proudly proclaim it “official” on conferences and all the C# devs jump off the cliff like lemmings, and the original OSS project dies/stagnates. MS might have officially embraced Open Source but they’re absolutely awful at fostering an OSS community.

But .NET itself is amazing! There’s this weird misconception in Microsoft land that if you choose .NET you must also use all MS’s half-assed libraries. Just use Postgres! Use a lean ORM like Dapper, use Redis, use whatever you want from the wider OSS ecosystem. There’s nothing about C# that forces you onto Entity Framework. Get out of that red polo shirt and look around, there’s a lot of cool stuff out there.

For those cases we do the same approach we have been doing with Java for decades, developing on Windows, deploying on Linux based instances.

Other than that, still too many projects depend on .NET Framework.

I still have too much of .NET version of Python 2/3 transition.