[neonsunset]

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?

[kuschku]

> {my favourite package}

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.

[neonsunset]

I don't think "JVM is more popular" argument does justice to Java (and Kotlin) strengths. With this reasoning, you could also say "C++ is more popular for systems programming" but it doesn't stop developers from switching to Rust, Zig or even C# as a wider scope and easier to use language that has gotten good at it.

Nonetheless, you could make this argument for select Apache products, but that's Apache for you. It does not hold true for the larger ecosystem and, at the end of the day, quantity is not quality, otherwise we would've all been swept by Node.js :)

Same applies to "packages that bundle native libraries".

First, they are always maintenance-heavy to manage with ever growing matrix of platforms and architectures. Just x86 alone is problem enough as all kinds of codecs perform wildly different depending if AVX2 or 512 is available vs SSE4.2 or even SSE2 without EVEX. Now add ARM64 with and without SVE2 to the mix. Multiply this by 2 or 3 (if you care about macOS or FreeBSD). Multiply linux targets again by musl and glibc. You get the idea. This a worst-case scenario but it's something Java is not going to help you with and will only make your life more difficult due to the reason below.

There is also an exercise in writing JNI bindings. Or maybe using Java FFM now which still requires you to go through separate tooling, build stage, deal with off-heap memory management API and still does not change the performance profile significantly. There's a reason it is recommended to avoid native dependencies in Java and port them instead (even with performance sacrifices).* Green Threads will only exacerbate this problem.

Meanwhile

    using System.Runtime.InteropServices;

    [DllImport("libc", EntryPoint = "putchar")]
    static extern int PutChar(int c);

    var text = "Hello, World!\n";
    foreach (var c in text) PutChar(c);

since C# 2 or maybe 1? No setup required. You can echo this snippet into Program.cs and it will work as is.

(I'm not sure if binding process on the ole Mono was any different? In any case, the above is a thing on Linux since 8 years ago at least)

Like with other false claims, the "better native packaging" one is easily disprovable. Just look at the list of supported platforms here: https://github.com/sandrohanea/whisper.net?tab=readme-ov-fil...

It even supports CoreML on iOS and macOS.

* Now applies to C# too but for completely different reason - you can usually replace data crunching C++ code with portable pure C# implementation that retains 95% of original performance while reducing LOC count and complexity. Huge maintenance burden reduction and "it just works" without having to ship extra binaries or require users to pull extra dependencies.

[kuschku]

> There is also an exercise in writing JNI bindings. Or maybe using Java FFM now which still requires you to go through separate tooling, build stage, deal with off-heap memory management API and still does not change the performance profile significantly. There's a reason it is recommended to avoid native dependencies in Java and port them instead (even with performance sacrifices).* Green Threads will only exacerbate this problem.

I'm not sure if you've used JNA before? That's been the state of the art for many years: https://github.com/java-native-access/jna

    public interface MSVCRT extends Library {
        public static MSVCRT Instance = (MSVCRT) Native.load("msvcrt", MSVCRT.class);
    
        void printf(String format, Object... args);
    }

    public class HelloWorld {
        public static void main(String[] args) {
            MSVCRT.Instance.printf("Hello, World\n");
            for (int i=0;i < args.length;i++) {
                MSVCRT.Instance.printf("Argument %d: %s\n", i, args[i]);
            }
        }
    }

> "C++ is more popular for systems programming"

Sure, and it's got many great libraries – but actually using those is horrible.

You're absolutely right about Rust though. crates.io and cargo are amazing tools with a great ecosystem.

The primary issue I've got with the .NET ecosystem is actually closely related to that. Because it's so easy to import native libraries, often there's no .NET version of a library and everyone uses the native one instead. But if I actually want to build the native one I've got to work with ancient C++ build systems and all the arcane trouble they bring with them.

> Same applies to "packages that bundle native libraries".

You seem to have misunderstood. The fun part of the maven ecosystem is that a dependency doesn't have to be a jar, it can also be an XML that resolves to one or multiple dependencies depending on the environment.

[neonsunset]

> The primary issue I've got with the .NET ecosystem is actually closely related to that. Because it's so easy to import native libraries, often there's no .NET version of a library and everyone uses the native one instead. But if I actually want to build the native one I've got to work with ancient C++ build systems and all the arcane trouble they bring with them.

What is the reason to continue making statements like this one? Surely we could discuss this without trying making accusations out of thin air? As the previous conversation indicates, you are not familiar with C# and its toolchain, and were wrong on previous points as demonstrated. It's nice to have back and forth banter on HN, I get to learn about all kinds of cool things! But this happens through looking into the details, verifying if prior assumptions are still relevant, reading documentation and actually trying out and dissecting the tools being discussed to understand how they work - Golang, Elixir, Swift, Clojure, etc.

> You seem to have misunderstood. The fun part of the maven ecosystem is that a dependency doesn't have to be a jar, it can also be an XML that resolves to one or multiple dependencies depending on the environment.

Same as above.

> JNA

I was not aware of it, thanks. It looks like the closest (even if a bit more involved) alternative to .NET's P/Invoke. Quick search indicates that it comes at an explicit huge performance tradeoff however.

From https://github.com/zakgof/java-native-benchmark?tab=readme-o...

"Now let's look into performance of the native call only, stripping out the struct allocation and field access:"

    Native call only (average time, smaller is better)

    JmhCallOnly.jna_direct   1373.435 ±  70.343  ns/op
    JmhCallOnly.jna          1346.036 ±  72.239  ns/op
    JmhCallOnly.bridj         383.992 ±  50.000  ns/op
    JmhCallOnly.jnr           298.334 ±  48.785  ns/op
    JmhCallOnly.jni_javacpp    56.605 ±   8.087  ns/op
    JmhCallOnly.foreign        49.717 ±   6.667  ns/op

This uses Win32 API. I will post numbers in a bit. .NET interop overhead in this scenario usually comes at 0.3-2ns (i.e. single CPU cycle which it takes to retire call and branch instructions) depending on the presence or absence of GC frame transition, which library loader was chosen and dynamic vs static linking (albeit with JIT and dynamic linking the static address can be baked into codegen once the code reaches Tier 1 compilation). Of course the numbers can be presented in a much more .NET-favored way by including the allocations that Java has to do in the absence of structs and other C primitives.

[kuschku]

> Quick search indicates that it comes at an explicit huge performance tradeoff however.

That's definitely true, but it should be possible to reimplement JNA on top of the new FFM APIs for convenient imports and high performance at the same time.

> Of course the numbers can be presented in a much more .NET-favored way by including the allocations that Java has to do in the absence of structs and other C primitives.

Hopefully Project Valhalla will allow fixing that, the current workarounds aren't pretty.

I fully agree though that .NET is far superior in terms of native interop.

> As the previous conversation indicates, you are not familiar with C# and its toolchain,

I've been using .NET for far over a decade now. I even was at one of the hackathons for Windows Phone developers back in the day.

Sure, I haven't kept up with all the changes in the last 2-3 years because I've been so busy with work (which is Kotlin & Typescript).

That said, it doesn't seem like most of these changes have made it that far into real world projects either. Most of the .NET projects I see in the real world are years behind, a handful even still targeting .NET Framework.

> were wrong on previous points as demonstrated.

So far all we've got is a back and forth argument over the same few points, you haven't actually shown any of my points to be "wrong".

[neonsunset]

> I've been using .NET for far over a decade now. I even was at one of the hackathons for Windows Phone developers back in the day.

This conversation comes up from time to time. It is sometimes difficult to talk to developers who have a perception of .NET that predates .NET Core 3.1 or so and newer. Windows Phone and its tooling is older. I am sad UWP has died, the ecosystem needs something better than what we have today, and the way Apple does portability with MacCatalyst is absolutely pathetic. In a better timeline there exists open and multi-platform UWP-like abstraction adopted by everything. But these were other times and I digress.

The package distribution did not change significantly besides small things like not having to write .nuspec by hand in most situations. Nuget was already good and far ahead of the industry at the time it was introduced.

The main change was the switch to SDK-style projects files. Kind of like Cargo.toml but XML.

Adding a file to a nuget package (or anything else you build) is just adding a <Content ... /> item to an <ItemGroup>.

Adding custom MSBuild stage or behavior is done via .targets file for packaging purposes: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/nuget/concepts/msbuild-pro...

Which is why I linked you Whisper.net. It has a .targets file that manages platform-specific dependencies: https://github.com/sandrohanea/whisper.net/blob/main/Whisper....

As you can see, it is possible to make definitions conditional and use arbitrary information provided by the build system. It is very powerful. I don't know what made you think that I assume anything about .jar files.

For another example, look at these lines: https://github.com/U8String/U8String/blob/main/Examples/Inte...

Together with <PublishAot> property, invoking 'dotnet publish -o .' calls into cargo to build a static library from Rust, then compiles C# project, then compiles the produced .NET assemblies to native object files with ILC (IL AOT Compiler), and then calls system linker to statically link together .NET object files and a Rust object file into a final native binary. The calls across interop, as annotated, become direct C ABI calls + GC poll (a boolean check, multiple checks may be merged so less than a branch per call).

This produces just a single executable that you can ship to users. If you open it with Ghidra, it will look like weird C++. This is a new feature (.NET 7+) but even without NativeAOT, it was already possible to trim and bundle CIL assemblies into a single executable together with JIT and GC. As far as I'm aware, the closest thing that Java has is Graal Native Image, which is even more limited than NativeAOT at the present moment (IL linker has improved a lot and needs much less annotations, most of which can be added as attributes in code and the analyzer will guide you so you don't need trial and error). And the project that allows to embed bytecode in the .NET trimmed single-file style in Java is still very far from completion (if I understood it right).

I think https://two-wrongs.com/dotnet-on-linux-update is more or less representative of unbiased conclusions one makes when judging .NET by its merits today. You can always say "it used to be bad". Sure. It does not mean it still is, and the argument is irrelevant for greenfield projects, which is what I advocate C# is the better choice for anyway.

> I fully agree though that .NET is far superior in terms of native interop.

This is not limited to native interop. At its design inception, C# was supposed to replace C++ components at MS. Then, in C# 2, a focus group including Don Syme if I'm not mistaken pushed for generics and other features. Someone posted a history bit here on HN.

This and influence from the projects like Midori (spans, struct improvements), and subsequent evolution (including the existence of Mono) and especially after it stopped being .NET Framework and became .NET resulted in a language that has much wider scope of application than most other GC-based languages, including Java, particularly around low-level tasks (which is also why it's popular in the gaming industry).

Unfortunately, the perception of "another Java" hurts the ecosystem and discourse significantly, as the language and the platform are very unlike this claim.