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Comment by christophilus | Hacker News Reader

It's been a few years since I used .NET, but the self-contained deployment story sounds like a big win that I used to really want:

"Self-contained deployment. Unlike FDD, a self-contained deployment (SCD) doesn't rely on the presence of shared components on the target system. All components, including both the .NET Core libraries and the .NET Core runtime, are included with the application and are isolated from other .NET Core applications. SCDs include an executable (such as app.exe on Windows platforms for an application named app), which is a renamed version of the platform-specific .NET Core host, and a .dll file (such as app.dll), which is the actual application."

So, this IL Linker is in support of that story, and aims to reduce the over all size of self-contained applications... Maybe it's time to start tinkering w/ .NET again.

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My company has some apps that we need to install on our customers servers. A linker would have been amazing for us 7 years ago as we could have targeted the (as of then new) 4.0 runtime and redistributed or binary. But as it was, we could only expect the 2.0 runtime to be installed so we can't really leverage a lot of stuff that's been out since then and had to write our own hacky versions of lots of common things.

Nowadays with dotnet core you can bundle the entire runtime with you binary. The linker is cool, in that it will create a strictly smaller binary, as in "hello world" might be 12mb instead of 50mb. That's cool, but it makes me wonder if .NET would be in a strategically better place today if the linker were present 10 years ago. How many companies didn't choose to write their app in c# simply because a customer might not have the runtime installed?

In any case I'm really impressed with everything Microsoft is doing with dotnet core and hope that I get to use more of it.

It certainly would. The reach of .NET was artificially restricted in many respects by making it a component of Windows. Mono provided the ability to just ship the runtime alongside the app, but Mono was also not "enterprise grade"; and of course there were always the missing bits and pieces, especially on the desktop front where such deployment made most sense.

It took a Microsoft that understood open source and non-Windows platforms, and was serious about it, to ultimately get us to the point where .NET Core could be a thing.

Until .NET Core provides support for many of the .NET Framework APIs still lacking from .NET Standard 2.0, many companies won't consider it "enterprise grade".

Examples on our case, WPF, WCF, ODP.NET drivers for ADO.NET.

I think .Net Core will never include WPF.

As far as I know, there are not plans for cross-platform GUI on .Net Core. And WPF is pretty much a dead technology.

> How many companies didn't choose to write their app in c# simply because a customer might not have the runtime installed?

More than enough to make a difference against Java.

I really want C#/.NET to gain ground against Java.

I started my career working for a .NET shop a few years ago, and immediately fell into a love/hate relationship with the technology stack.

I loved C#, as it seemed to be a fantastically well-designed language that had learned a lot from Java's mistakes. Visual Studio was great, too.

However, as a longtime Linux and open source supporter, I loathed Windows and Microsoft's software culture. And honestly, the .NET open source culture - even now - is kind of lacking. C# shops typically wait for some canonical solution from MS rather than creating and sharing libraries themselves.

I really, really like the new direction that Microsoft is taking, and I hope that the open source community will embrace C# in a bigger way.

.NET for over a decade and "C# shops typically wait for some canonical solution from MS" rings quite true.

With NuGet I don't think it's as bad as it was, but I just caught myself hesitating when I found out this week that .NET has deprecated email sending functionality in 4.7 (or Core?) and is now recommending open source alternatives.

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