Appreciate the earnest reply. This is a much better discussion now.
> Do you truly know real software developers using any these new features? I must not be working anywhere cool because I’m always having to explain what they mean in code reviews.
If you mean 9-5 devs, I am not even afforded the luxury of working with C# at all! Haven’t been since before .net core. I do ruby and devops. That being said, I have a side project with dozens of real users, closing in on double digit “market” share. I’ve needed to do some serious performance optimizations (it is a fork). The ValueType flexibility makes it easier to do these improvements.
Init applies to properties, readonly to fields (and methods in structs, or valuetype parameters).
The switch expression is something I’m also not sure about yet, but makes for less clutter in the editor. I think it’s part of a general strategy of providing the language with more compact syntax options. It reminds me of the pattern matching in F#. Did the language need those? Not really, but my biggest annoyance with older C# was the verbose syntax, and it factored into my perception at the time that it was a dinosaur language.
Roslyn is open source, cross-platform, written in C#, and can be forked. The analyzers can be linked as dependencies to any source project. I don’t understand the VS/Windows connection. They are just basically hooked methods that run during compilation steps and can emit compiler warnings, errors, suggestions, or automatically fix code. I think you are shooting yourself in the foot if you throw that feature out on pride.
Nullable reference types are optional on the file or project level and function more as type assertions, and don’t represent separate classes. I understand the frustration with it though. I think the language needed this in order to be able to statically analyze the expressions for nullability instead of relying on runtime checks. Those runtime checks are notoriously unreliable as a safety net because you have to remember to use it, and make a decision on using it. They made a tough call but I think it was the right one.
Structs are not records and are in fact mutable by default! It can be converted to a ref and then mutated, without unsafe code. The readonly modifier prevents that. I haven’t studied the nuances of readonly structs vs record structs yet. It’s considered a bad practice to use mutable structs (and undermines compiler optimization) but if you’ve ever had to refactor a class to a struct, with hundreds of usages, having the mutability can make the task much easier to do incrementally.
I think they are careful, but the decisions are very difficult and sometimes it’s a loss in either direction. C# prefers to change with the times but remain backwards-compatible, but I don’t envy the jobs of the language committee.