To a point. Making cross platform native desktop apps is still in the hands of 3rd party vendors such as Avalonia and Uno. MAUI was supposed to fix that oversight to a less than stellar results.
If there were an old version of C that only worked on one platform but had a graphical toolkit in its standard library, and a new version of C that is cross platform but that graphical toolkit is now ambiguously still sort-of part of the standard library but still not cross platform (and there was no realistic alternative)... Then yes it would be valid to object C is not really cross platform.
back when .NET was first launched it was advertised as the new way of making desktop applications on Windows.
Visual C# made it very easy to design GUI interfaces.
So this "it's all for backend now" notion is surprising.
.Net is "Microsoft Java". Like Java it was designed to do everything, but as desktop development died (and mobile development was locked down by Apple and Google, limiting it to their corporate languages), it pivoted towards networked applications.
They were legally forbidden from going the Embrace-Extend-Extinguish route there, so they had to build their own version from scratch. C# exists because J++ couldn't.
Is Kotlin the most "active", "hot", or "up-and-coming" competitor? Possibly. But the "largest"? Its deployed footprint and popularity are nowhere close to Java's at this point in time.
No and it's not even close. Kotlin only has a single Jetbrains Compose (I presume Kotlin Multiplatform is the same thing). It is also subject to the quirks and specifics of JVM implementations, build-systems and package management. Kotlin native partially bypasses this, but its performance is a factor of 0.1-0.01x vs OpenJDK (if there is new data - please let me know). This is very unlike NativeAOT which is on average within 90% of CoreCLR JIT but is also a performance improvement in variety of scenarios.
C# and F# get to enjoy the integration that is "much closer to the metal" as well as much richer cross-platform GUI frameworks ecosystem with longer history.
There are more than 10 sibling and gp comments that exhaustively address the GUI and other questions :)
> That's a massive advantage over the arcane package management and build systems of .NET.
Very few languages ever achieve a build and package management system as mature and usable as the Java ecosystem.
I've been waiting for 12 years for .NET to match Java's ecosystem, and it's still not there yet.
If you want to sell me on "advantages" of invoking Gradle or Maven over
dotnet new web
dotnet run
curl localhost:port
or
dotnet new console --aot
echo 'Console.WriteLine($"Right now is {DateTime.Now}");' > Program.cs
dotnet publish -o {here goes the executable}
or
dotnet add package {my favourite package}
I suppose you would actually need 12 years of improvements given how slow if ever these things get resolved in Java land.
Also, what's up with Oracle suing companies for using incorrect JDK distribution that happens to come with hidden license strings attached?
Well, that's where the problem lies, isn't it? The ecosystem for .NET is extremely limited compared to what's available for the JVM
And the way JVM packages are distributed, with native libraries, BOMs and platforms allows more versatility than any other platform.
The build system may be better in dotnet, but that only really matters for the first 10 minutes. Afterwards, the other tradeoffs become much more important.
> NET Multi-platform App UI (.NET MAUI) apps can be written for the following platforms:
> - Android 5.0 (API 21) or higher is required.
> - iOS 11 or higher is required
> - macOS 11 or higher, using Mac Catalyst.
> - Windows 11 and Windows 10 version 1809 or higher, using Windows UI Library (WinUI) 3.
Okay, where's Linux? That's what Mono was originally made for and where Mono really shines.
Also, the development experience isn't great either:
> - If you are working on Linux, you can build and deploy Android apps only
> - You need a valid Visual Studio or IntelliCode subscription
The getting started guide only exists for Windows and macOS and the forum post announcing experimental Linux support is full of caveats.
I don't think you and I would agree on what "cross-platform" means, especially in the context of Mono being donated to Wine, which is a heavily linux-centric discussion topic.