Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft Launches Its .NET Distribution for Linux and Mac

techcrunch.com

51–60 of 249 posts

Re: Microsoft Launches Its .NET Distribution for Linux and Mac

#51
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has Google/Mozilla made the same commitments to Go/Rust?

It's a bit different when there's a runtime required to run the apps. An app written in Go/Rust today will run on a machine 10, 20, 100 years from now as it's just an entirely self-contained executable. A .NET app will only run on a machine that has a functioning and supported .NET framework.

You can always compile the .NET Framework into your app... https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn584397(v=vs.110)....

Re: Microsoft Launches Its .NET Distribution for Linux and Mac

#53
post #28

F# is a real breath of fresh air in comparison to something like Scala. It's direct ML heritage really shows, also just diving in with an IDE (like Xamarin, or I suppose Visual Studio) is super easy. I see it as the future of pop-functional programming. For example look at the way it handles type inference w/ JSON parsing. Compare that to what you have to do to parse JSON in Scala. It's subtle, but a major usability…

You would think something like OCaml would fill in that niche with its wider availability.

Re: Microsoft Launches Its .NET Distribution for Linux and Mac

#54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow yes, apt-get install dotnet anyone? Should Microsoft provide a few common platform install methods?

It would be hilarious if it became easier to install .NET on Linux than it is to install Java.

Or easier to install .NET on linux that it is on Windows for that matter...

Re: Microsoft Launches Its .NET Distribution for Linux and Mac

#55
post #28

F# is a real breath of fresh air in comparison to something like Scala. It's direct ML heritage really shows, also just diving in with an IDE (like Xamarin, or I suppose Visual Studio) is super easy. I see it as the future of pop-functional programming. For example look at the way it handles type inference w/ JSON parsing. Compare that to what you have to do to parse JSON in Scala. It's subtle, but a major usability…

Scala is getting really interesting lately though with projects like Spark and SparkSQL. Spark takes a Scala AST tree and computes a plan on it in order to distribute it to a cluster of possibly thousands of nodes and then uses transformations on that plan, similar to how an SQL query optimizer works, to make the plan more efficient. The cluster compute benchmarks on it are crazy good.

The only problem I have with Scala is that it has so many features that it tends to have a steeper learning curve than most languages. However, this is mitigated somewhat in that it lets one switch between object and functional depending on what's more convenient or performant, thus making it easier for programmers who are not highly skilled in functional programming to pick up.

Re: Microsoft Launches Its .NET Distribution for Linux and Mac

#56
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a bit different when there's a runtime required to run the apps. An app written in Go/Rust today will run on a machine 10, 20, 100 years from now as it's just an entirely self-contained executable. A .NET app will only run on a machine that has a functioning and supported .NET framework.

You can always compile the .NET Framework into your app... https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn584397(v=vs.110)....

This only works for Windows Store applications, which is a tiny subset of all the .NET applications out there.

Re: Microsoft Launches Its .NET Distribution for Linux and Mac

#58
post #15
post #9

Does it include the source? And how liberal is the license?

https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr MIT license

How about patent use grants, hmm?

If I remember correctly, Microsoft is making a lot of money off of Android by licensing patents.

Re: Microsoft Launches Its .NET Distribution for Linux and Mac

#59
post #28

F# is a real breath of fresh air in comparison to something like Scala. It's direct ML heritage really shows, also just diving in with an IDE (like Xamarin, or I suppose Visual Studio) is super easy. I see it as the future of pop-functional programming. For example look at the way it handles type inference w/ JSON parsing. Compare that to what you have to do to parse JSON in Scala. It's subtle, but a major usability…

You would think something like OCaml would fill in that niche with its wider availability.

They do seem like very similar languages. I imagine in most cases your choice would have effectively already been made for you by the context -- e.g. whether you wanted the option of fast native binaries (OCaml) or deep .NET integration (F#).

Re: Microsoft Launches Its .NET Distribution for Linux and Mac

#60
post #31

This is interesting but is there any commitment to support it long term? I remember when Silverlight was supposed to be the savior that brought .NET to Mac and Linux, but that didn't last more than 5 years. Would be nice for MS to say they guarantee support for 10, 15, etc. years.

Silverlight is still supported by Microsoft - https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle?c2=12905

Supported with bug fixes, sure. Supported well enough to do modern application development (with the latest C#, .NET framework features, etc)? No. The last major release (Silverlight 5) was 4 years ago.
Post reply on HN