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Official proposal for Type Unions in C#

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Re: Official proposal for Type Unions in C#

#91

Post by giancarlostoro »

pjmlp wrote: post #85
giancarlostoro wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's even worse, plenty of Azure itself is C#, and I don't mean a few dashboards, I mean the infrastructure itself, heck the serverless infrastructure's open source and its basically C#. I'm sure the same could be said of AWS and Java (making an assumption), or Google Cloud Platform and Go / Python.

Ironically, given the past history that lead to .NET existence, https://devblogs.microsoft.com/java https://www.microsoft.com/openjdk https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/languages/java Because it turns out, making Java running on Azure, on those 60% Linux workloads, is lot of money. Also plenty of Azure, anything CNCF related, is mostly Go and Rust. Which is kind of sad, I would expect Azure to be a good contributor f…

Fully agreed! It's really interesting how diverse their entire platform really is in the grand scheme of things. One thing I had hoped to see is one of those IL conversion projects that can make JVM bytecode and .NET bytecode co-habitate would have taken off slightly more. I guess the only real way to make those work is to either target both for WASM or implement the standard library of the respective languages in the target platforms, which is a can of worms.

Re: Official proposal for Type Unions in C#

#92

Post by giancarlostoro »

radicalbyte wrote: post #78
giancarlostoro wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me its C# and Python, though I like Rust, D and lately been getting into Nim. I want to like Lisp, but its just not something I see someone paying me to work in.

C# for real work, Python for scripting or specific use-cases where it has excellent library support & Golang if I need something closer to C or very lightweight or easy for people to understand. Rust is interesting but the compile times aren't great.

I use Python for real work too, but my current employer does not use it as much.

Re: Official proposal for Type Unions in C#

#93

Post by colonCapitalDee »

lolinder wrote: post #45
mlinhares wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, people continue to pick Java or Go when they want to build their enterprise systems if they're not already married to Microsoft. There's not a single widely distributed infra application in C# out there. When people want to build stuff like kafkas, kubernetes, consuls, they still go to Java/Go/C++.

This comment is kind of out of the blue because no one in this thread is advocating for using C# for infrastructure projects. Java is frankly a bad choice for that too these days for a new project, and for the same reason: why would you develop infrastructure in a language that requires shipping a runtime when Rust and Go exist? That made a lot more sense back when C/C++ was your only other real choice. Meanwhile, pl…

C# recently came out with Native AOT (ahead of time) compilation that compiles your app to a binary that can run without the .NET runtime (!!), and has fast startup and lower memory overhead. There are a few drawbacks: many reflection and run-time code generation and loading features are unavailable, and LINQ expressions must be interpreted which makes them slow. But it's easy to work around those limitations for a greenfield infra project, and C# has great performance characteristics.

Re: Official proposal for Type Unions in C#

#94

Post by steego »

rafaelmn wrote: post #58
wk_end wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instead of C#, why not F#? You get proper ADTs among many other great features, but you still get all the utility of the .NET ecosystem.

F# has it's own warts, tooling isn't as polished, stuff like type providers sound really cool but suck in practice IMO, file ordering being relevant for compilation is bleh... Every time I try to use it I'm left with a feeling it's not worth the hassle over C#. C# has been quite nice for 10 years and they keep improving consistently with every version.

Not to dismiss your criticisms, but I love that file ordering is relevant for compilation for one key reason:

It forces you to reconcile your architecture as it gets bigger and before you accidentally turn it into a monolithic nightmare. IMO, It's more than just a preemptive defense against cyclomatic complexity. Going into unfamiliar F# code, the file ordering is usually a huge clue where to start reading first.

Re: Official proposal for Type Unions in C#

#95

Post by tubthumper8 »

Can anyone explain why this is called "type unions"? I've never heard it named that before. It's a bit weird, because it's not a union across types (like ALGOL68), it appears to be a tagged union like in ML-family languages.

Is this just a case of "C# developers like to make up different names than established terminology"? (see: SelectMany, IEnumerable, etc.)

Re: Official proposal for Type Unions in C#

#96

Post by kgeist »

tubthumper8 wrote: post #95

Can anyone explain why this is called "type unions"? I've never heard it named that before. It's a bit weird, because it's not a union across types (like ALGOL68), it appears to be a tagged union like in ML-family languages. Is this just a case of "C# developers like to make up different names than established terminology"? (see: SelectMany, IEnumerable, etc.)

"Tagged" sounds like an implementation detail to me (that it has a "tag" internally to tell between types). I suspect they added "type" to "union" to make it clear what is about (about types). The syntax itself has just "union", judging by the document.

UPD. They have this in the FAQ:

  Q: Why are there no tagged unions?
  A: Union structs are both tagged unions and type unions. Under the hood, a union struct is a tagged union, even exposing an enum property that is the tag to enable faster compiler generated code, but in the language it is presented as a type union to allow you to interact with it in familiar ways, like type tests, casts and pattern matching.

Re: Official proposal for Type Unions in C#

#97

Post by xeromal »

rafaelmn wrote: post #73
hnthrow289570 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The language itself is nice, the code bases that companies produce with it is not, and sadly that reputation plays into your decision to choose a career stack. You're going to have patterns from the .NET Framework era being ported to .NET Core projects. It works, but you'll have two paradigms of doing things mixed into your project. I envy people who only do hobbyist C# so get to work on code bases that have all the…

I definitely dislike most C#/.NET developers/community (every time mediator is mentioned I want to stab myself) and would rather work with people in F#/FP. But when you have to work on "diverse" development teams having some sort of patterns established (flawed as they are) brings some order to the insanity.

My brain really likes how organizes C# libs tend to be compared to the 50 different organization schemes I deal with in node and python

Re: Official proposal for Type Unions in C#

#98

Post by LAC-Tech »

I always think it's a shame that instead of C# becoming a better OO language, they keep trying to become an uglier F#. IE, why is the syntax for multiple dispatch still so clunky?

I know I know, pseudo OO took over the world, and then people revolted against it, so the easiest thing to do to stay relevant is to become "slightly functional with curly braces", rather than to actually try and do OO well.

Re: Official proposal for Type Unions in C#

#99

Post by HideousKojima »

CBarkleyU wrote: post #88
CharlieDigital wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A very common modern setup is PostgreSQL, C#/.NET, Linux & using JetBrains Rider for the IDE You just described the startup I'm at. All devs are on Arm64 MacBooks and we deploy to Arm64 AWS T4g Linux instances. I'm all VS Code, others are primarily Rider. .NET is a highly underrated platform for backend; it always puzzles me when teams think about moving from TypeScript to Rust or Go instead of C# because it seems a…

I'm itching to try and deep dive into go as a C# dev. I'm getting sick of enterprise C#, even if it is .NET8 I guess the grass is always greener somewhere

Worst part for me about Go is how exceptions are usually basically handled the way that they would be with a Result in Rust, but without an actual Result type. That and how nulls are handled, feels like the worst of both worlds.

Re: Official proposal for Type Unions in C#

#100

Post by progmetaldev »

djeastm wrote: post #81
hnthrow289570 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The language itself is nice, the code bases that companies produce with it is not, and sadly that reputation plays into your decision to choose a career stack. You're going to have patterns from the .NET Framework era being ported to .NET Core projects. It works, but you'll have two paradigms of doing things mixed into your project. I envy people who only do hobbyist C# so get to work on code bases that have all the…

>You're going to have patterns from the .NET Framework era being ported to .NET Core projects. It works, but you'll have two paradigms of doing things mixed into your project. I've been spending the past couple years migrating various platforms from Framework to the new .NET and as long as you've got a head on your shoulders it's not too bad. Also, new projects in .NET are fantastic to work with, imo.

I have been doing the same, but I would be willing to bet that you're probably more disciplined than the average .NET developer (or at least have taken the time to learn more than just the surface features available). In my experience, most .NET developers don't take the time to really learn the framework (whether traditional .NET Framework, or the Core framework). It is a great feeling once you've got a Framework project migrated over to current .NET and everything is running along smoothly. My experience has mostly been migrating content management systems.
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