.NET Runtime VS sdk

Compare .NET Runtime vs sdk and see what are their differences.

.NET Runtime

.NET is a cross-platform runtime for cloud, mobile, desktop, and IoT apps. (by dotnet)

sdk

Core functionality needed to create .NET Core projects, that is shared between Visual Studio and CLI (by dotnet)
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.NET Runtime sdk
606 113
14,047 2,532
2.2% 1.8%
10.0 10.0
6 days ago about 14 hours ago
C# C#
MIT License MIT License
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

.NET Runtime

Posts with mentions or reviews of .NET Runtime. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-04-22.
  • The Performance Impact of C++'s `final` Keyword
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 22 Apr 2024
    Yes, that is true. I'm not sure about JVM implementation details but the reason the comment says "virtual and interface" calls is to outline the difference. Virtual calls in .NET are sufficiently close[0] to virtual calls in C++. Interface calls, however, are coded differently[1].

    Also you are correct - virtual calls are not terribly expensive, but they encroach on ever limited* CPU resources like indirect jump and load predictors and, as noted in parent comments, block inlining, which is highly undesirable for small and frequently called methods, particularly when they are in a loop.

    * through great effort of our industry to take back whatever performance wins each generation brings with even more abstractions that fail to improve our productivity

    [0] https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr/blob/4895a06c/src/vm/amd64...

    [1] https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/blob/main/docs/design/core... (mind you, the text was initially written 18 ago, wow)

  • Java 23: The New Features Are Officially Announced
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Apr 2024
    If you care about portable SIMD and performance, you may want to save yourself trouble and skip to C# instead, it also has an extensive guide to using it: https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/blob/69110bfdcf5590db1d32c...

    CoreLib and many new libraries are using it heavily to match performance of manually intensified C++ code.

  • Locally test and validate your Renovate configuration files
    4 projects | dev.to | 9 Apr 2024
    DEBUG: packageFiles with updates (repository=local) "config": { "nuget": [ { "deps": [ { "datasource": "nuget", "depType": "nuget", "depName": "Microsoft.Extensions.Hosting", "currentValue": "7.0.0", "updates": [ { "bucket": "non-major", "newVersion": "7.0.1", "newValue": "7.0.1", "releaseTimestamp": "2023-02-14T13:21:52.713Z", "newMajor": 7, "newMinor": 0, "updateType": "patch", "branchName": "renovate/dotnet-monorepo" }, { "bucket": "major", "newVersion": "8.0.0", "newValue": "8.0.0", "releaseTimestamp": "2023-11-14T13:23:17.653Z", "newMajor": 8, "newMinor": 0, "updateType": "major", "branchName": "renovate/major-dotnet-monorepo" } ], "packageName": "Microsoft.Extensions.Hosting", "versioning": "nuget", "warnings": [], "sourceUrl": "https://github.com/dotnet/runtime", "registryUrl": "https://api.nuget.org/v3/index.json", "homepage": "https://dot.net/", "currentVersion": "7.0.0", "isSingleVersion": true, "fixedVersion": "7.0.0" } ], "packageFile": "RenovateDemo.csproj" } ] }
  • Chrome Feature: ZSTD Content-Encoding
    10 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Apr 2024
    https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/issues/59591

    Support zstd Content-Encoding:

  • Writing x86 SIMD using x86inc.asm (2017)
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Mar 2024
  • Why choose async/await over threads?
    11 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 25 Mar 2024
    We might not be that far away already. There is this issue[1] on Github, where Microsoft and the community discuss some significant changes.

    There is still a lot of questions unanswered, but initial tests look promising.

    Ref: https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/issues/94620

  • Redis License Changed
    11 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 20 Mar 2024
    https://github.com/dotnet/dotnet exists for source build that stitches together SDK, Roslyn, runtime and other dependencies. A lot of them can be built and used individually, which is what contributors usually do. For example, you can clone and build https://github.com/dotnet/runtime and use the produced artifacts to execute .NET assemblies or build .NET binaries.
  • Garnet – A new remote cache-store from Microsoft Research
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 18 Mar 2024
    Yeah, it kind of is. There are quite a few of experiments that are conducted to see if they show promise in the prototype form and then are taken further for proper integration if they do.

    Unfortunately, object stack allocation was not one of them even though DOTNET_JitObjectStackAllocation configuration knob exists today, enabling it makes zero impact as it almost never kicks in. By the end of the experiment[0], it was concluded that before investing effort in this kind of feature becomes profitable given how a lot of C# code is written, there are many other lower hanging fruits.

    To contrast this, in continuation to green threads experiment, a runtime handled tasks experiment[1] which moves async state machine handling from IL emitted by Roslyn to special-cased methods and then handling purely in runtime code has been a massive success and is now being worked on to be integrated in one of the future version of .NET (hopefully 10?)

    [0] https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/issues/11192

    [1] https://github.com/dotnet/runtimelab/blob/feature/async2-exp...

  • Common Sorting Algorithms in C# - From My Experience
    1 project | dev.to | 2 Mar 2024
    Orderby Linq Code Reference
  • The Mechanics of Silicon Valley Pump and Dump Schemes
    8 projects | dev.to | 18 Feb 2024
    The math of the above is really simple. Microsoft has 13,000 stars on their GitHub profile for their flagship product. SupaBase has 63,000 stars on their GitHub project for their flagship product. 27% of all software developers in the world are using .Net. SupaBase has 4.5 times as many likes as the .Net Core runtime, so they must be 4.5 times as large, right? 4.5 multiplied by 27% becomes 130%. Implying 130% of all software developers that exists on earth are using SupaBase (apparently!)

sdk

Posts with mentions or reviews of sdk. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-02-06.
  • Programmatically elevate a .NET application on any platform
    2 projects | dev.to | 6 Feb 2024
    [DllImport("libc")] private static extern uint geteuid(); public bool IsCurrentProcessElevated() { if (RuntimeInformation.IsOSPlatform(OSPlatform.Windows)) { // https://github.com/dotnet/sdk/blob/v6.0.100/src/Cli/dotnet/Installer/Windows/WindowsUtils.cs#L38 using var identity = WindowsIdentity.GetCurrent(); var principal = new WindowsPrincipal(identity); return principal.IsInRole(WindowsBuiltInRole.Administrator); } // https://github.com/dotnet/maintenance-packages/blob/62823150914410d43a3fd9de246d882f2a21d5ef/src/Common/tests/TestUtilities/System/PlatformDetection.Unix.cs#L58 // 0 is the ID of the root user return geteuid() == 0; }
  • Swift was always going to be part of the OS
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Dec 2023
    > There's definitely things they tried to improve on that... weren't really improvements. The way "assemblies" are matched in .NET is much more sophisticated- the goal there was to try to kill DLL hell. It evolved into the Global Assembly Cache, which is sort of the Windows Registry of DLLs. Not a huge fan of those bits.

    The Global Assembly Cache did not make the jump to the modern .NET (Core). There was the thing called `dotnet store`, but it’s broken since .NET 6: https://github.com/dotnet/sdk/issues/24752

    The assembly redirection hell has also been greatly reduced there.

  • .NET Blazor
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 21 Nov 2023
    I do the same.

    I have a small write-up here: https://chrlschn.dev/blog/2023/10/end-to-end-type-safety-wit...

    You get end-to-end type safety (even better once you connect it to EF Core since you get it all ways to your DB).

    With this setup with hot-reload (currently broken in .NET 8 [0]), productivity is really, really good. Like tRPC but with one of the most powerful ORMs out there right now.

    [0] https://github.com/dotnet/sdk/issues/36918

  • Why does dotnet cli not support updating sdk's?
    1 project | /r/dotnet | 16 Nov 2023
    Noticed an open issue just now.
  • .NET 8 – .NET Blog
    12 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 14 Nov 2023
    You're thinking of https://github.com/dotnet/sdk/issues/22247
  • LÖVE: a framework to make 2D games in Lua
    26 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 13 Sep 2023
    That's a twisted and wrong narrative

    Unity like refers to a Editor driven approach

    Unity became popular with its moonscript language (javascript like), they then ditched it to focus on C#, but what propelled unity to what it is today is the Editor driven approach, not c#, not DOTS

    They are forced to transpile C# to C++ via IL2CPP as a result to target consoles/mobiles

    C# is a disease when it comes to console/mobile support

    It's a substantial dependency, quite heavy

    And you are not free of unity like fuck ups, it's a microsoft language after all:

    https://github.com/dotnet/sdk/issues/22247

    And let's not forget when they changed the license of their debugger overnight to prevent people from using it in their products (jetbrains for example)

    And them deprecating open source tooling to a proprietary/closed one for vscode (c# devkit)

    Let's be careful when we recommend evil as an alternative to evil ;)

  • How to run multiple programs like python3 filename.py???
    1 project | /r/csharp | 21 May 2023
    The script can be found at the end of the thread here https://github.com/dotnet/sdk/issues/8742
  • Writing Python like it's Rust
    10 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 21 May 2023
    Another difference you might be surprised by is that the .NET tooling by default collects various data from your system and sends it to Microsoft [1]. If you want to avoid this (and still want to use .NET) you'll have to make sure that the environment variable DOTNET_CLI_TELEMETRY_OPTOUT is set in all contexts before touching anything.

    [1] https://github.com/dotnet/sdk/issues/6145

  • .NET 8 is on the way! +10 Features that will blow your mind 🤯
    3 projects | dev.to | 18 May 2023
    SDK Pull Request
  • Disadvantages of using F# with Mono?
    2 projects | /r/fsharp | 7 May 2023
    Pretty sure the final file referenced here https://github.com/dotnet/sdk/issues/8742 is the one I am thinking of.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing .NET Runtime and sdk you can also consider the following projects:

Ryujinx - Experimental Nintendo Switch Emulator written in C#

kdmapper - KDMapper is a simple tool that exploits iqvw64e.sys Intel driver to manually map non-signed drivers in memory

ASP.NET Core - ASP.NET Core is a cross-platform .NET framework for building modern cloud-based web applications on Windows, Mac, or Linux.

MQTTnet - MQTTnet is a high performance .NET library for MQTT based communication. It provides a MQTT client and a MQTT server (broker). The implementation is based on the documentation from http://mqtt.org/.

actix-web - Actix Web is a powerful, pragmatic, and extremely fast web framework for Rust.

WASI - WebAssembly System Interface

vscodium - binary releases of VS Code without MS branding/telemetry/licensing

CoreCLR - CoreCLR is the runtime for .NET Core. It includes the garbage collector, JIT compiler, primitive data types and low-level classes.

vgpu_unlock - Unlock vGPU functionality for consumer grade GPUs.

Mono - Mono open source ECMA CLI, C# and .NET implementation.