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Comment by bunderbunder | Hacker News Reader

There is one language that stands way out at the forefront when it comes to working on enabling B grade programmers to write scalable, concurrent systems: C#.

I think a big part of its success is that it avoids the hype machine. It isn't a disruptive language that changes the way we do things. It can't be, or management would be justifiably wary of it. Instead, it's a language that started out as a very close clone of Java, and since then its designers have been rapidly iterating to the point that it's now a (mostly, some would say) functional language that's solidly embedded in the enterprise space.

It's somewhat disappointing that it's still missing algebraic data types and pattern matching. But considering I've got most of what I want without ever having had to pitch switching languages to an employer, I'm really not in a position to complain too much.

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While I don't disagree that C# is good, I don't see how you could say that Java is in any way behind. At least in concurrency, I would argue that it's somewhat ahead. Threading in Java was more intuitive to me than threading in C#.

Both this and the parent post should be more specific, as pre-lambda, pre-TPL threading in C# was not too much different from standard Java threads. Long-standing language support for events and delegates put C# slightly ahead of Java at the start, but only in the last few years has C# left Java in the dust.

It's been a while since I last spent much time with Java, but to my knowledge it's still missing:

- User-defined value types

- Lambdas

- An equivalent to LINQ (and PLINQ)

- Language-level support for asynchronous programming

- True generics (Java's implementation is essentially syntactic sugar on good old-fashioned typecasting.)

- Extension methods

- Late binding

Most of those have nothing to do with threading.

GGP:

   While I don't disagree that C# is good, I don't see how
   you could say that Java is in any way behind.

GP:

   [List of features where Java is behind.]

(May have missed that the sub-thread is about 'scalable, concurrent systems', though typical C# development leaves threading worries to ASP.NET/SQL libraries.)

Personally, I would appreciate it if you'd share how Java threading beats C# threading, particularly C#'s async/await. I don't know much about Java.

Fair. I had interpreted you as saying you didn't feel like Java was far behind C# in general.

I'm not terribly versed in what Java's got going for it in the concurrency department, so I'm not really qualified to speak to that. The stuff that's been happening in C# and .NET since version 3 is pretty fantastic, IMO, but I don't really know the details about how what Java has compares.

No, I greatly prefer C# to Java. I just prefer the clarity of thread management in Java - it feels a bit more high level than C#.

In the past few years C# updates and new .net libraries have had a sort of concurrency and parallelism focus.

The Task Parallel Library (TPL)[1] is basically like goroutines in Go. They're a concurrency construct, for executing code that gets multiplexed to threads via the thread pool by default. Absurdly useful and very easy to use. This contains stuff like Task, Parallel.ForEach, .ContinueWith() etc.

The TPL Dataflow[2] stuff added just recently is data pipelining. Completely thread-safe communication of data, with the ability to construct a complex data pipeline that your data gets pushed through. Similar to channels in Go.

Also added recently are the async and await keywords[3] in C# and VB.NET. These are compiler features that allow you to write asynchronous code exactly the same way as you would write synchronous code. Basically a replacement for the IAsyncResult + BeginFoo/EndFoo pattern, it allows you to write simple and readable asynchronous code. Not necessarily multi-threaded as it can be used with single-threaded code, but it allows the stuff that interacts with your multi-threaded code to not bend over backwards for it.

[1] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd460717.aspx

[2] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/devlabs/gg585582.aspx

[3] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh191443.aspx

Don't forget Rx [1]

It enhances support for the IObservable/IObserver interfaces, the duals of IEnumerable/IEnumerator, allowing Linq manipulation of asynchronous events.

As others have discussed or at least alluded to, C# certainly started out on a par with Java, but has grown into a different beast altogether, if one makes use of all the new developments mentioned.

These days my C# code is very un-Java-like, and far more Functional.

[1] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/data/gg577609.aspx

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