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Comment by jeswin | Hacker News Reader

This is about being able to use the language/framework you already know to compile to pure native binaries (like Rust, but with GC). It's a big deal since it makes C# viable in places where it isn't currently, like a lot of Go's use cases.

I had been away from C# for nearly 6 years, but was able to pick up Core in a couple of days. If anything, things have gotten simpler and there's fairly good cross platform support. What rapid changes are you referring to?

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C# has long supported it on UWP side, but now with .NET 5 there is an ongoing discussion if they will still support it or not.

The whole MDIL (Windows 8/8.1) and .NET Native (Windows 10) came from WinDev, not DevDiv, hence why it has its own idiosyncratics regarding .NET support.

Now with .NET 5, it seems they are gearing towards just a better NGEN, thus shipping a kind of AOT/JIT mixed mode image, which isn't being that well received and most likely the survey to feel the community.

Interesting, they are removing WinRT support from .NET 5 CoreCLR and instead adding a system that lets the Windows team plug in the marshaling stuff:

https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/issues/35318

coreclr.dll is currently half a megabyte smaller than the 3.1 release.

It is based on the same ideas as C++/WinRT, which I am still bitter about, because it represents a productivity drop versus C++/CX as the ones pushing for it are hoping that ISO C++23 eventually gets the features that enables the VS tooling with C++/CX today.

So you are back to manually copying files around and writing IDL files with Notepad like experience as if using ATL style development in 2020.

Most likely C#/WinRT seems to follow the same fate in productivity drop.

That was a requirement twenty years ago when the framework wasn't bundled in the operating system and download speeds were much slower. It's really a non-issue now.

The whole point of .NET Core is to bundle the framework with the application.

I thought the whole point was to become cross platform. You can install the runtime on its own. Bundling an application and the framework isn't a requirement.

Some .NET Framework libraries that were ported to .NET Core are never going to stop being Windows only.

Being cross platform is an nice side effect of the whole rebooting process.

Or maybe there isn't a single "the whole point" and it can be useful for different reasons to different people?

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