Hacker News Reader

Comment by 0x0 | Hacker News Reader

It looks like the open source cross-platform version of .NET, v5 ("core"?), is something that was written completely from scratch?

Why wouldn't they open source the v4.x version? And why is WPF, Windows Forms, and ASP.NET placed above the .NET 4.x block in the diagram?

Is .NET v5 Core a from-scratch lightweight reimplementation that can't run the full stack? If not, why the huge separation?

View on HN

It is fairly clear on the GitHub repositories.

It's not a reimplementation but a gradual publish of existing code, upgraded to meet the required standards (some of it was not written with being open in mind).

WPF will not be available on non-Windows platforms. That has always been the case and will remain so - it has a far to deep integration with the OS for it to ever be platform independent and a reimplementation would be an absolutely ginormous effort.

Thanks for clarifying.

And on a tangent, I guess the WPF thing was expected. But! I also thought WPF is mostly a re-implementation of all the windows widgets on top of a framebuffer - it doesn't use native win32 buttons, dropdowns, text rendering, etc etc...?

It doesn't depend on Win32, but MilCore depends on DirectX 9, so I guess it would be hard to port to other platforms.

I don't think it's written from scratch. Why would it be? WPF and Windows Forms have some Windows specific stuff that would be irrelevant in a cross-platform version.

That's what I'm asking. It's very unclear, even when reading stuff like http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dotnet/archive/2014/12/04/introducin...

I remember looking at the corefx github project just after the announcement, and it was very sparse with just a few commits and classes; it looked a lot like a brand new project written from scratch.

This wording also makes it sound like ".net core" is a re-boot, scorched earth reimplementation which will take some time to reach the levels of the original .net:

>.NET Framework 4.6

>The .NET Framework is still the platform of choice for building rich desktop applications and .NET Core doesn’t change that.

>For Visual Studio 2015 our goal is to make sure that .NET Core is a pure subset of the .NET Framework. In other words, there wouldn’t be any feature gaps. After Visual Studio 2015 is released our expectation is that .NET Core will version faster than the .NET Framework. This means that there will be points in time where a feature will only be available on the .NET Core based platforms.

They didn't develop it in git, just dumped it in github. That explains the lack of commits.

I don't see how the quote substantiates the notion that .NET core is written from scratch.

In fact, a quote from [1] clearly states that it contains "largely the same code ... refactored":

".NET Core also includes the base class libraries. These libraries are largely the same code as the .NET Framework class libraries, but have been factored (removal of dependencies) to enable us to ship a smaller set of libraries."

[1] http://www.dotnetfoundation.org/netcore5

Reply on news.ycombinator.com