Comment by cess11 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cess11 | Hacker News Reader

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The only thing that comes close is .NET, and that's MICROS~1. On the timescales in my business that's not an option, they can't be trusted to not act like Oracle does and they are deeply ingrained into important libraries in that "ecosystem".

Rumour has it that there is some PDF/A capable library for .NET, but I would have to put in quite some time to figure out if it is low level enough for the control I need and whether there are additional libraries suited for layout and typography. Since I might have to ditch it within five years, that's not an option.

Some people claim .NET developer ergonomics on Linux are fine now, but those I know personally that tells me this are using VSCode, which I consider a rather shoddy piece of software. Am I going to take the time and see if it's the case? Fiddle around with IntelliJ plugins and try to setup a LSP for vim and whatnot? Nope, I won't, because there is no revenue in that, and I might suddenly have to do the great rewrite several times at once further down the line.

Maven is a turd, but a very solid one when you've figured out the XML incantation you need. I'm not sure what the alternatives are in .NET-land, or whether I can feel that I trust that they will work fine in ten years, like fifteen year old Maven projects tend to do. GraalVM allows me to output neat executables too.

Java has Wildfly. What's the equivalent in .NET? Running a MICROS~1 Windows Server with IIS? That's not an option.

And so on and so on.

For developing .Net (Core) on Linux? Rider is your best option from JetBrains. Most development still happens on Windows though because Visual Studio is best option if running Linux Desktop is most important thing for you.

However running it? .Net runs on both Windows and Linux with performance generally being much better on Linux. .Net Team IME also recommends Linux as well unless you are doing some Windows only things.

Web Server? .Net comes with built in cross platform Web Server called Kestrel which is pretty darn performant so most people just run Kestrel and proxy it with something like Nginx/Caddy though it's not required.

After dealing with both companies, if you put a gun to my head and said "Oracle or Microsoft?" Microsoft hands down. Both are licensing nightmares but Microsoft has never come close to hostage taking behavior that Oracle has. Don't even get me started on Oracle Database Core license requirements in virtual environments. MSSQL never went that bad.

Yeah, no one can afford to have me use Visual Studio.

Performance isn't a pain point for me. Currently I'm developing a crude ETL tool that does a lot of string stuff and a typical run produces hundreds of thousands of PDF files, unoptimised it finishes in less than an hour on my late middle age laptop. I might not even spend time chasing cycles because I can keep a rather fast development cadence anyway. For excellent performance in network services I reach for the BEAM.

Wildfly is an application server. Kestrel would, as far as I can tell, be comparable to Tomcat or Jetty.

Having spent some time migrating away from Oracle DB but never having managed to convince an organisation to move off MICROS~1 I'm pretty sure the latter are better at it. If I get to decide neither liability becomes a dependency.

> The only thing that comes close is .NET, and that's MICROS~1. On the timescales in my business that's not an option, they can't be trusted to not act like Oracle does and they are deeply ingrained into important libraries in that "ecosystem".

Many libraries and/or frameworks come from companies you could argue cannot be trusted (Meta, Google...) but do you shy away from anything they produce and stick to something developed independently somehow? In the case of .Net: it has been around for a long time, and it has changed drastically. It was closed source, Windows-only and it wasn't sleek. Then they rebooted the whole thing into .Net Core. Open source, platform independent, much thinner, development in the open.

> Some people claim .NET developer ergonomics on Linux are fine now, but those I know personally that tells me this are using VSCode, which I consider a rather shoddy piece of software.

My personal experiences with VSCode and the recent C# extensions have been fine for small projects, but if that's not your thing, there's also JetBrains' Rider, which I have very good experiences with as well.

> Maven is a turd, but a very solid one when you've figured out the XML incantation you need. I'm not sure what the alternatives are in .NET-land, or whether I can feel that I trust that they will work fine in ten years, like fifteen year old Maven projects tend to do.

The package manager aspect is Nuget in the .Net ecosystem. It's easier than Maven in the sense that you can control it from your IDE or from the command line, instead of having to edit your pom.xml or the .Net equivalent (which has one extra layer when compared to Maven; solutions containing projects).

> Java has Wildfly. What's the equivalent in .NET? Running a MICROS~1 Windows Server with IIS? That's not an option. The equivalent in .Net is Kestrel, which is part of ASP.Net, and can run on Linux. It's a little less work to setup than Wildfly (which is not a lot of work either) because it's bundled.

> And so on and so on. It's surely not for everyone but I think Microsoft has taken a great turn with it after the "reset". Is it going to be like this forever? I don't know, but looking at the past, at the direction Microsoft has taken it, I think it's gotten much better.

Of course, I wouldn't advocate rewriting your Java-based softwarescape into .Net (or the other way around) lightly, way too expensive and Java will probably get the job done.

Yeah, I do, unless it's small enough for me to maintain or already mainly maintained by people unaffiliated with those companies. The country they have their headquarters in is quite belligerent and they are habitually criminal, e.g. with regards to data protection rights.

If you want command line incantations you can easily invent your own program to do the edits, simple with sed or awk, more advanced with JAXB. The reason no one does is that XML editors are quite capable and in practice pom-editing isn't particularly annoying.

I agree that MICROS~1 is trying to woo developers, but in every other area I'm looking they're absolute dogshit. They seem to want to turn consumer Windows into a rent a thin client sort of deal, their strategy in acquisition seems entirely driven by the threat of anti-trust legislation when it's not clearly insane, stuff like that. If they reach a degree of developer lock-in they find sufficient I'm sure they're going to do Oracle style squeezes.

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