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Comment by Nelkins | Hacker News Reader

Depends on what your definition of "solid" is. Since most of the shiny new stuff is coming out on .NET Core first (think Span<'T>), it means that if a project is targeting .NET Standard (a set of APIs that can run on .NET Framework or .NET Core) it has to wait until that new stuff is ported to the other frameworks and a new version of .NET Standard is released.

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> most of the shiny new stuff is coming out on .NET Core first

I hadn't fully appreciated prior to this post that .NET Core has things that aren't in .NET Framework, let alone .NET Standard. I thought it was a portable subset (a core, if you will) of the full .NET languages and APIs. I don't know whether that makes me more interested in Core, but I'm certainly less inclined to target any other flavor.

Core is one of those Microsoft branding words that wound up used everywhere, denotes one thing, but means almost something else entirely. (Not unlike the .NET brand itself in its early years.) In the developer side Core has meant "open source rewrites that can break backward compatibility to move forward".

(Windows has also had several Core-branded things, at least as internal brands that have externally leaked over the last few years or been used to describe Windows Insider initiatives, but there they seem to more actually mean "core" as denoted as pure subset, though it sounds often in those cases they did imply nearly-from-scratch rewrites like the Developer initiatives with that branding.)

Well, .Net Core started as a subset of .Net Framework APIs. Now that they're adding a lot of them back with .Net Core 2.0 and 3.0, it's no longer accurate.

Though ASP.NET Core was never really a subset of ASP.NET.

.NET Core was never a pure subset of .NET Framework API: it broke compatibility in some places, and it had new features/capabilities in others, leaving the full .NET Framework to catch up on those. (There's an interesting overview of some of that in the histories of the .NET Standard versions < 2, when it sometimes felt unsure if the Full .NET Framework would be .NET Standard compatible, because .NET Core had the wheel on .NET Standard.)

ha, Yes it often seems that MS is intentionally trying to confuse developers with their naming. I truly do not understand it.

Then again, two hard problems in CS, etc. etc.

Span<T> only requires .NET Standard 1.0, so it came out for Core and Framework at the same time [1].

.NET Framework only has the portable implementation though. The fast implementation requires support in the runtime, and Framework may never support fast Span<T> [2].

[1] https://www.nuget.org/packages/System.Memory/4.4.0-preview1-... [2] https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr/issues/18280#issuecomment-...

Also, .Net Framework still doesn't have support for Span<T> on existing types like Stream. Though those APIs will be in .Net Standard 2.1, so presumably they will be in some future version of .Net Framework too.

Did not know that, thank you!

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