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Comment by chrisseaton | Hacker News Reader

Doesn't have the same kind of large and innovative ecosystem around it, like competitors such as the JVM.

It's true the JVM has a large ecosystem, but the .NET one is still pretty substantial. I would also argue there's a fair bit of innovation in the .NET Core world :)

> I would also argue there's a fair bit of innovation in the .NET Core world :)

They need to make it more visible if there is! I think it's pretty rare to see a .NET paper. I can't remember the last time I saw one, where there are tons of major JVM research projects.

It feels like .NET focuses primarily on the library and language side of things. In C# you can write surprisingly low-level optimized code. See the introduction of Span<T> for instance: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/msdn-magazine/2018/.... Or huge lists of improvements such as https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/performance-improvemen....

This is in contrast to the JVM where Java is showing its age, but mountains of work poured into the JVM keep it performant: OpenJ9 and Hotspot, Project Loom, Zero GC, as well as big non-Oracle investment such as Shenandoah GC contributed by Redhat, etc.

I can't say I know what's happening with the CLR itself, but they've shipped several major improvements in the language, server, standard library etc that have brought significant performance gains which make .NET Core one of those most performant stacks on the market.

The innovation in the .net world tends to be by companies in the .NET ecosystem, which historically have not been focused on open source or open research. Improvements in the microsoft world tend to be private.

Yeah. This is probably my only beef with .NET ecosystem. There are a lot of great open source libraries and whatnot, but what you see comparatively little of is core systems a lot of software depends on being written in .NET Core. I'm mainly thinking about all the type of stuff you see in the Apache Foundation.

The language itself is incredible, and just keeps getting better and better with every release.

It'd be neat to see people turning to .NET when writing those kinds of systems, but maybe it's just not cool enough in the Bay Area.

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