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A History of .NET Runtimes

mattwarren.org

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Re: A History of .NET Runtimes

#61

Post by Const-me »

bunderbunder wrote: post #27
gambler wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>.NET is still very popular but it definitely did not fulfill the more ambitious dreams that Bill Gates had for it. There is still time. It just recently got open-sourced, got a compiler written in itself and got a run-time unbundled form all the legacy crap. Those things held C#/.NET back. I feel this is a good time to adopt it for people who want to have reasonable performance, static typing and a mix of OOP/functi…

Part of me, though, worries that the ship has sailed. For a while .NET was probably completely fine from Microsoft's perspective, because the platform was (AFAICT) dominant in their target market of enterprise apps. Then big data became a thing, and basically the entire core ecosystem was written in Java. I think it's becoming a bit of a wedge issue - Java has everything that .NET has, but .NET does not have its own…

> Java has everything that .NET has

Java offers nothing for game developers, there're multiple game engines written in .NET or using .NET. Java only runs on Android, .NET on all mobiles. Native interop in Java is a joke.

Re: A History of .NET Runtimes

#62

Post by coldacid »

iainmerrick wrote: post #58
pjmlp wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How come C# generics are a copy of Java when they were invented first and the only reason they didn't make it to 1.0 was not to delay the release schedule? Java annotations are based on .NET atributes, and initially had a clusmy implementation requiring an annotations processing tool until they finally got integrated into javac. LINQ paved the way to more FP acceptance among enterprise developers. Check "confessions…

Hang on, Wikipedia says Generic Java was 1998, generics were adopted in J2SE 5.0 in 2004, and C# 2.0 wasn’t released until 2005. Am I missing something? I’m sure there was cross-fertilization both ways but it seems like Java generics came first. LINQ is a good one though, that’s definitely a .NET innovation.

If you trust Wikipedia for your answers, I have a bridge to sell you.

Re: A History of .NET Runtimes

#63

Post by iainmerrick »

pjmlp wrote: post #60
iainmerrick wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hang on, Wikipedia says Generic Java was 1998, generics were adopted in J2SE 5.0 in 2004, and C# 2.0 wasn’t released until 2005. Am I missing something? I’m sure there was cross-fertilization both ways but it seems like Java generics came first. LINQ is a good one though, that’s definitely a .NET innovation.

Yes you are missing the remaining part of the sentence "the only reason they didn't make it to 1.0 was not to delay the release schedule". Don Syme of F# fame was leading generics research since 1999, while they were designing the CLR, but it was clear they would have to delay 1.0 if they wanted to included them, so they just went ahead without them for 1.0 release. https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dsyme/2011/03/15/n…

Just lost out in a photo finish, then (over a span of 5 or 6 years...!)

But Generic Java was started in 1998 (IIRC originally as part of Pizza). It seems reasonable to say that Java covered this ground first.

Re: A History of .NET Runtimes

#64

Post by iainmerrick »

coldacid wrote: post #62
iainmerrick wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hang on, Wikipedia says Generic Java was 1998, generics were adopted in J2SE 5.0 in 2004, and C# 2.0 wasn’t released until 2005. Am I missing something? I’m sure there was cross-fertilization both ways but it seems like Java generics came first. LINQ is a good one though, that’s definitely a .NET innovation.

If you trust Wikipedia for your answers, I have a bridge to sell you.

Combined with other sources, and when it fits with my own recollection, sure.

I played around with Pizza (AKA Generic Java) in the late 90s, before the launch of C#.

Re: A History of .NET Runtimes

#65

Post by bitwize »

Someguywhatever wrote: post #11
bitwize wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft developed .NET (internal codename COOL) to get back at Sun for suing them over Java compliance. Microsoft wanted to do embrace-extend-extinguish with the Java runtime and Sun would have none of it, so Microsoft took their ball and were like "Fine! We'll develop our OWN managed runtime and it'll be more better-er than yours is! Neener neener!" And Bill certainly did program in low level assembly. The last Mi…

I think it is better-er than Java and the JVM and they have stewarded their language much better than Java, and now Java borrows heavily from C#. I think they will win in the long run if they haven't "won" already.

Considering the language and runtime in themselves, I agree.

But they sort of missed the point of Java, which was that it was cross-platform, and a single Java package could be expected to run on a variety of hardware and OS loadouts with no changes (except maybe in configuration). Microsoft, at the time, wanted .NET to be closely tied to Windows, and though the base libraries were submitted to ECMA, to get anything useful you had to have Windows and Microsoft's Windows-only libraries. (There was Mono, but it was not compatible with Microsoft's stuff and few on the Linux side wanted to touch it.)

Things are changing, obviously, with .NET Core. We'll see if Microsoft or someone else solves for cross-platform GUI and other end-user concerns, where .NET has historically been strongest.

Re: A History of .NET Runtimes

#66

Post by merb »

mariusmg wrote: post #22
pjmlp wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, they were forced to sort out the mess introduced with WinRT, UAP, UWP, by making UWP .NET Standard 2.0 compliant, and now making Forms, WPF and EF 6 runnable on top of .NET Core 3.0. However given the last Office related announcements, it appears that the reorganization did little to sort out those political issues.

Next stop, making UWP crossplatform :)) Regarding the political issues, the Silverlight/WinRT clusterfuck also helped with WindowsPhone downfall. Release 1.0 and next major update offered a API incompatible with 1.0, what a clusterfuck....

> Next stop, making UWP crossplatform :))

they do not need. they have xaml over xamarin.forms, which supports all major platforms (including desktopn and mobile) it still says that its in preview however the only things that did not work well is when you need some kind of file interaction with the os, you need to create native views for all your OSs (i.e. NSFilePicker, OpenFileDialog, etc..) since there is no Xamarin.Forms widget for that. besides that it is already really mature.

Re: A History of .NET Runtimes

#67

Post by pjmlp »

Const-me wrote: post #61
bunderbunder wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of me, though, worries that the ship has sailed. For a while .NET was probably completely fine from Microsoft's perspective, because the platform was (AFAICT) dominant in their target market of enterprise apps. Then big data became a thing, and basically the entire core ecosystem was written in Java. I think it's becoming a bit of a wedge issue - Java has everything that .NET has, but .NET does not have its own…

> Java has everything that .NET has Java offers nothing for game developers, there're multiple game engines written in .NET or using .NET. Java only runs on Android, .NET on all mobiles. Native interop in Java is a joke.

Actually Java had jMonkey and LibGDX before Unity became the engine it is today. Which initially was Mac only and only used Boo and Unity Script as programming languages.

Khronos does have some official OpenGL specs for Java. There are none from them for .NET.

Java runs on iOS via Codename One and Gluon AOT compilers.

Native interop in Java was made hard on purpose, as Sun was pushing for WORA. Oracle is in the process of improving the situation with Project Valhala.

I love both stacks, truth is that .NET still has a bit to catch up outside Windows, while Java lost a bit of its mojo on desktops.

Re: A History of .NET Runtimes

#69

Post by jeremycarter »

dusanbab wrote: post #46

Back in 2008/9 I was a co-founder at a company (Red Five Labs) that created a .NET Compact Framework runtime for Symbian OS (featured on most Nokia & Samsung smartphones at the time). We got to a .NET CF 2.0 level of compatibility. It was a venture-backed startup out of Johannesburg, South Africa. Although we wrote the runtime ourselves, we made extensive use of some of the mono libraries until we were able to rewrit…

I remember this! Good memories

Re: A History of .NET Runtimes

#70

Post by elisee »

_cbsz wrote: post #68

The recent Software Engineering Daily podcast on "Unity and WebAssembly" mentions that Unity has a .NET to C++ toolchain. Is that some kind of stock Mono feature, or is that another .NET runtime? https://www.softwaredaily.com/post/5ba9fdd63e3767000494fe01/...

That's probably IL2CPP, developed at Unity: https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/IL2CPP.html
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