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Comment by runT1ME | Hacker News Reader

A bit peculiar they selected a .NET language after running into a lack of libraries in OCaml. I'd be perfectly happy to use C# or F# the language, but I still find .NET lagging behind the JVM/Python/Go ecosystems. Two large OSS projects I'm using for work are Scylla and Apache Beam, both of which don't have native support for .NET, and I'm sure we can find plenty of others.

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> but I still find .NET lagging behind the JVM/Python/Go ecosystems

It probably depends on what libraries you seek. In the enterprise software world the only options for a vendor's library/SDK are often .NET or JVM (and asking them "Do you have a Python or Go library" will probably elicit a response of "What in tarnation do snakes and board games have to do with programming?").

As for whether it's CLR or JVM, the question's usually answerable with:

    if vendor.preferred_os == 'Windows':
        'CLR'
    else:
        'JVM'

And since Windows is still pretty commonplace in a lot of smaller enterprise software shops, CLR ends up being the norm for a lot of the COTS products out there.

Its not necessary to speculate, the blog post about moving away from OCaml specifically talked about cloud provider SDKs (AWS and GCP): https://medium.com/darklang/leaving-ocaml-fce7049a2a40?sourc...

I was talking more in general, beyond Dark's specific needs. But yes, in Dark's scenario the library availability issues are clearer.

Go?! I don't think there's even a comparison here -- the .Net ecosystem is huge compared to such a newcomer. I've been looking at .Net libs (for F# and C#) and JVM libs (for Clojure) recently, and I've came across way more old, crufty, poorly-documented Java libs than the .Net ones.

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