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Comment by satysin | Hacker News Reader

Which is why I have no doubt the Universal Windows Platform will become the Universal Platform and be a true desktop/tablet/mobile/server/etc Java competitor on all major OS (mobile, traditional and server).

It must be rather frustrating for Microsoft to look back a decade or more and see they were sitting on the exact technology a hell of a lot of people said would be their future had they made it cross-platform from the start. I remember using C# for the first time around 2004 and thinking "god damn if this were cross-platform like Java it would kill Sun". Back then Microsoft couldn't see past the tip of their nose though.

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Yup, I've been playing around with C# more lately and it's such a good language.

Things like embedding with native code is trivial compared to Java. Want to call a delegate(with extras) from a C function pointer? Sure thing, just specify some syntax and away you go. Marshalling strings? Just works.

Totally a breath of fresh air compared to the mess that is JNI.

Me too, back in the first .com wave I had access to early betas and was quite critic of it, nowadays I enjoy using it more than Java.

Although I do still like Java, just don't like having to wait for Java 10 for some of the .NET features already available (possible free AOT compiler, value types, reified generics, JNI replacement).

But that's what .NET wanted to be. That's what Silverlight wanted to be.

Until now they didn't do what was necessary to make that a reality -- actually fully embrace other platforms.

IMO this is why Google is currently building a new universal OS from scratch. They know the power Microsoft can yield with this. It will take some time to catch on, but when it does, it's going to be so big.

I think this can be explained by the fact that Microsoft has a long history of trying to kill OSS software and alternatives to it's virtual monopoly in the desktop OS market, killing innovation across many technology sectors in the process. Being cross-platform was the opposite of their goals. They specifically created their own version of open technologies and promoted them as the best/only way of doing things on windows - see directx/opengl, and mictrosoft intentionally degrading opengl performance on windows in order to hurt the OSS community.

http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/01/Why-you-should-use-OpenGL-an...

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