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"Vanilla" .NET runs on
Operating Systems: Linux, macOS, Windows, FreeBSD, iOS, Android, Browser
Architectures: x86, x86_64, ARMv6, ARMv7, ARMv8/ARM64, s390x, WASM
Notes:
Mono as referred here means https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/tree/main/src/mono which is an actively maintained runtime flavor, alongside CoreCLR.
- application development targets on iOS and Android use Mono (the one that lives in dotnet/runtime). Android can be targeted as linux-bionic with regular CoreCLR, but it's pretty niche. iOS has experimental NativeAOT support but nothing set in stone yet, there are similar plans for Android too.
- ARMv6 requires building runtime with Mono target. Bulding runtime is actually quite easy compared to other projects of similar size. There are community-published docker images for .NET 7 but I haven't seen any for .NET 8.
- WASM also uses Mono for the time being. There is a NativeAOT-LLVM experiment which promises significant bundle size and performance improvements
- For all the FreeBSD slander, .NET does a decent job in supporting it - it is listed in all sorts of OS enums, dotnet/runtime actively accepts patches to improve its support and there are contributions and considerations to ensure it does not break. It is present in https://www.freshports.org/lang/dotnet
At the end of the day, I can run .NET on my router with OpenWRT or Raspberry Pi4 and all the laptops and desktops. This is already quite a good level given it's completely self-contained platform. It takes a lot of engineering effort to support everything.
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SaaSHub
SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews. SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives
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I think you're being overly optimistic in assuming that is actually the case. Bugs like https://bugs.llvm.org/show_bug.cgi?id=39282 make me think that even simple examples like you wrote could have had problems. Here's a similar bug but for GCC: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/54878#issuecomment-...
I'm sure there were probably others.
It's generally true that C/C++ code rarely if ever uses restrict & that Rust was the first to actually put any real pressure on those code paths and once it was found it took over a year to fix and it's incorrect to state that the miscompilation was only in code patterns that would only exist in Rust.
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There is a runtime (not C#) feature that has been added that is relevant to the article: ref fields in structs. Before these, only certain runtime-blessed types like Span could contain refs directly.
In case anyone is interested, here is the spec about refs in structs and other lifetime features mentioned in the article:
https://github.com/dotnet/csharplang/blob/main/proposals/csh...
And here is the big list of ways .NET differs from the publish ECMA spec. Some of these differences represent new runtime features.
https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/blob/main/docs/design/spec...
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> The only grudge I have against them is they promised us discriminated unions since forever and they are still discussing how to implement it. I think that is the greatest feature C# is missing.
To ease the wait you could try Dunet (discriminated union source generator).
https://github.com/domn1995/dunet
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Cool article!
Quick nitpick: the find example could return a reference to a static variable, and thus avoid both the heavy syntax and the leaked allocation:
https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=stable&mode=debug&editio...
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https://github.com/neon-sunset/project-anvil/blob/master/Sou...
You might get better results by using snippets as the inspiration for rolling something tailored to your specific use-case.
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Uno Platform
Open-source platform for building cross-platform native Mobile, Web, Desktop and Embedded apps quickly. Create rich, C#/XAML, single-codebase apps from any IDE. Hot Reload included! 90m+ NuGet Downloads!!
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Avalonia
Develop Desktop, Embedded, Mobile and WebAssembly apps with C# and XAML. The most popular .NET UI client technology
you should checkout AvalonuiaUI[0] or unoPlatform[1] if wanting to target web/mobile/window/linux/macOS
if building for the web online, asp.net core runs on Linux servers as well as windows
and there's MAUI [2] ( not a fan of this), you are better-off with with the others.
in summary c# and .NET is cross-platform, third party developers build better frameworks and tools for other platform while Microsoft prefers to develop for Microsoft ecosystem, if you get
[0] https://avaloniaui.net/
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dotnet
This repo is the official home of .NET on GitHub. It's a great starting point to find many .NET OSS projects from Microsoft and the community, including many that are part of the .NET Foundation.
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CsWin32
A source generator to add a user-defined set of Win32 P/Invoke methods and supporting types to a C# project.
I feel that nowadays Rust is the language to go when you are doing system programming, but C# is not a bad choice either. With .NET 9 being released in a few weeks we will get NativeAOT (compilation to a native single binary) for x86 (x64 and ARM64 are already available). At work, I'm writing patches for legacy apps and needed to use C++ for most of my tasks. Nowadays, I'm doing more and more stuff in C# and enjoying it. For WinAPI there is a fantastic cswin32 [1] project that generates FFIs signatures on the fly. And it's fairly simple to extend it for other Windows libraries (I did it for detours [2], for example). And using pointers or working with native memory blocks is straightforward and intuitive for people with C/C++ background.
[1] https://github.com/microsoft/CsWin32
[2] https://lowleveldesign.wordpress.com/2024/07/11/implementing...
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Besides the other GUI libraries people have mentioned, there is also Eto: https://github.com/picoe/Eto
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It isn't trivial but it is supported. Here is an example [0] toy.
I am not aware of any production grade replacement GCs for .NET out there currently
https://github.com/kkokosa/UpsilonGC
