.NET Runtime VS referencesource

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

.NET Runtime

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

referencesource

Source from the Microsoft .NET Reference Source that represent a subset of the .NET Framework (by microsoft)
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.NET Runtime referencesource
602 88
13,914 3,090
2.7% 0.7%
10.0 0.0
2 days ago about 2 months 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 2024-03-26.

referencesource

Posts with mentions or reviews of referencesource. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-05-30.
  • Why your F# evangelism isn't working
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 30 May 2023
    Just like every language is able to be slow/non-performant -- but OO in this case would be Python in a web context; it doesn't invalidate that a good amount of OO codebases in the wild devolve into incomprehensible black boxes, where no one has any idea what anything does or how to make meaningful changes that fulfill the intent of (compare that to iterative programming, where you can atleast read it)

    A list: I give you a vector. Plain and simple. Not this insanity: https://referencesource.microsoft.com/#mscorlib/system/colle... You do not need OO to create a vector (or even an array -- god forbid!)

    As for trees: roll your own. They're simple enough, yet tightly-coupled with context that no generic implementation exists that is flexible enough. You do not need OO to create a tree. C has been working with trees long before the current Frankensteination of OO was even a twinkle in Gosling's eye.[0]

    Data structures do not need inheritance -- they might need delegation (message passing that requires you to actually think about your system).

    Data structures do not need encapsulation -- they most likely need namespaces. Realistically, most classes will be used as namespaces.

    Data structures do not need polymorphism -- just implement the methods you need, and name them appropriately (no 5+ word phrases, please. Please!)

    What modern OO does is lower the barrier to productivity in the present, and then pays for it in the future. It's no different than writing your "planet scale" backend system in JS.

    [0] If you want to know why we have Java: some guys that didn't have the time to think about low-level (memory management specifically) things for their embedded applications, got sick of trying to learn C++, decided to make their own language. That's it. There was no grand plan or thoughtful design -- it's just a mismash of personal preference.

    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 30 May 2023
    List is an IList/IReadOnlyList; these interfaces do nothing that couldn't be done right inside the file itself.

    https://referencesource.microsoft.com/#mscorlib/system/colle...

    https://referencesource.microsoft.com/#mscorlib/system/colle...

    Instead we have to go diving through the IList, which implements ICollection, which implements IEnumerable, which implements IEnumerable (again). Just because each interface is composed of another interface, doesn't mean you aren't using inheritance. You are effectively creating a custom inheritance tree through willy-nilly composition.

    It is gratuitous to make this chain so deep, when the underlying code is just a handful of lines.

    https://referencesource.microsoft.com/#mscorlib/system/colle...

    https://referencesource.microsoft.com/#mscorlib/system/colle...

    https://referencesource.microsoft.com/#mscorlib/system/colle...

    ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    The doc-strings are unnecessary. It's self-evident what most of the code does if you read it.

            // Returns an enumerator for this list with the given
  • Multi-Key Dictionary in C#
    2 projects | /r/dotnet | 31 Jan 2023
    .net itself has arbitrary interfaces, ex https://github.com/microsoft/referencesource/blob/master/mscorlib/system/action.cs
  • Bring WCF apps to the latest .NET with CoreWCF and Upgrade Assistant
    5 projects | /r/dotnet | 5 Nov 2022
    Not enough people care. And you can compile the APIs yourself from the .NET Framework reference source if you really want it. System.Messaging was added to the .NET Framework reference source in this PR.
  • Ask HN: Examples of Top C# Code?
    29 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 25 Oct 2022
  • What do you think is more readable when using LINQ: Query Expressions or Method Expressions?
    4 projects | /r/csharp | 21 Oct 2022
    Now go review the code at https://github.com/microsoft/referencesource/blob/master/System.Xml.Linq/System/Xml/Linq and find where those parts are in LINQ to XML.
    4 projects | /r/csharp | 21 Oct 2022
  • How to Validate an Email Address in C#
    2 projects | dev.to | 20 Oct 2022
    Let’s look at another example. The following is a regex used by Microsoft in their EmailAddressAttribute class:
  • We doing this?
    3 projects | /r/ProgrammerHumor | 19 Oct 2022
    If I trained an AI to make a Java VM by getting it to learn from Microsoft's Reference Source licensed .NET framework. Would I be allowed to make a profit or distribute my Java VM?
  • Why do Task.Wait and Task.Result even exist?
    3 projects | /r/csharp | 28 Aug 2022
    And the actual implementation: https://github.com/microsoft/referencesource/blob/master/mscorlib/system/threading/Tasks/ThreadPoolTaskScheduler.cs

What are some alternatives?

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

Ryujinx - Experimental Nintendo Switch Emulator written in C#

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

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

WASI - WebAssembly System Interface

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.

runtimelab - This repo is for experimentation and exploring new ideas that may or may not make it into the main dotnet/runtime repo.

dotnet-wasi-sdk - Packages for building .NET projects as standalone WASI-compliant modules

sdk - Core functionality needed to create .NET Core projects, that is shared between Visual Studio and CLI

Uno.Wasm.Bootstrap - A simple nuget package to run C# code in a WASM-compatible browser

SharpLab - .NET language playground

Roslyn - The Roslyn .NET compiler provides C# and Visual Basic languages with rich code analysis APIs.