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Comment by DeathArrow | Hacker News Reader

.NET is open. You can find its source on Github. The .NET platform being open doesn't mean everything targeting the .NET platform is open, too.

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A problem of the .NET ecosystem is that there is no open source debugger for C#. The Microsoft-provided debugger has strict license terms that only allow it to be used in Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code.

JetBrains needed to write their own debugger for their cross-platform IDE Rider. Luckily they already knew a lot about .NET to do this and it turned out very well but it's still not the official debugger and also not open source.

Why do you care about the debugger not being open source?

Did JetBrains open source their debugger?

No, they are equally "guilty". At least they don't brag how OSS friendly they are.

There is open source debugger from Samsung (https://github.com/Samsung/netcoredbg/), but it does not see much use.

> There is open source debugger from Samsung (https://github.com/Samsung/netcoredbg/), but it does not see much use.

If you want to debug C# from Emacs, it’s the only choice AFAIK.

To be fair: that is their sole income: dev tools.

So write your own? That’s kind of the whole point of an open system.

you can use lldb that's open source

Are you sure about that? LLDB is primarily a native code debugger. For .NET you want to debug "managed" stack frames and variables.

Yes, you can debug .Net using LLDB if you use the open-source SOS extension: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/diagnostics/sos....

How does the lack of an open-source debugger (which is wrong by the way, there are several projects on github), invalidate the fact that .NET is open-source?

https://github.com/Samsung/netcoredbg

and there is a VSCode extension that uses this instead of the MS debugger

https://open-vsx.org/extension/muhammad-sammy/csharp

You could however reasonably expect that core tools like debugger and LSP will be open too.

Maybe? These are just implementations, right? Others will still be able to build tools? JetBrains isn't pushed out by this, is it?

Java flight recorder, for example, wasn't always open source. While it's not ideal, I'm not sure the idea of closed source tools in an open language is all that unheard of.

Key tools of the platform not being open means the platform is either not open or not useable, take your pick.

This is like saying PCs aren't open because most people use Windows.

PCs have tons of closed source firmware and BIOS. So no, PCs aren't open!

Windows isn't open. But you could argue there are open alternatives to Windows.

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