[rchowe]

Python has a much more mature ecosystem than Rust, especially for AI/ML stuff. I ran into a rust crate that purported to do a certain ML algorithm but did not do it correctly. I managed to write a replacement with Claude though.

I do think enforcing correctness at the type system level is a good idea for AI, which is why I often choose languages like C# and Rust over Python. However, for some things Python is definitely the correct tool for the job.

[sshine]

I almost always pick Rust. Recently I wrote a plugin for something that was written in Go. I could have used Rust, but Go for one felt right because if the thing turned out well, others would surely find more value in having one toolchain.

The main reason is that you’re capable of reading it if you need to. And the recipient ecosystem expects a language. That’s why some data science communities pick R, MatLab, Julia, Python or Mojo not depending on what’s superior tech, but what their peers speak.

[josh-sematic]

What peers are speaking Mojo? I’m not aware of any place it’s penetrated enough to be a “lingua Franca”

[CharlieDigital]

C# feels kinda nice because it's a good balance.

Very good static typing, Roslyn analyzers, good tooling and decent hot reload (for a compiled language), really good ORM (EF Core) that implements UoW and reduces a lot of the need for transaction management (simplifying the code), flexible enough and fast enough for various kinds of use cases.

Source generators are underrated as well since they can make the code very terse and legible by generating a lot of standard boilerplate.

[alexjplant]

I've written this before, but C# is a great language held back by its culture. I'd say that 80% of C# shops I've seen used it because they were started in the late 00s by some IT guy with a surplus HP server and a dream whose whole world was Microsoft products. They were staffed by people with little knowledge of OSS products who self-identify as ".NET developers" instead of software engineers. Almost invariably they seem to have some gnarly legacy monolith that everybody is slowly chipping away at while old-timers continue deploying .NET services to IIS running on Azure VMs because it's a small evolution of what they've been doing for the better part of 20 years.

In the interest of fairness the San Francisco version of this is also a thing: a giant, untyped ball of Rails spaghetti from the same period running on Heroku that everybody has Stockholm Syndrome'd their way into loving because of Ruby's elegance and beauty. The burden is merely shifted from a large Microsoft to a series of small SaaS companies :-)

Exceptions to this rule exist (hence my "80%") and modern .NET is lovely but it seems that the non-Java/Python mindshare is now taken up by the Golangs and Rusts of the world. It's a true shame since I do love C# for basically being a better Java.

[DeathArrow]

Hmm, I am working on C# microservices based apps since 6 years ago. And I always deployed on cloud using Linux, usually in Kubernetes. I used Google Cloud and AWS beside Azure.

The whole stack is open source, Kubernetes, Docker, Hashicorp tools, Postgres, Redis, MongoDB, RabbitMQ, NATS, Kafka, Prometheus, Elastic Search, Kibana, Grafana and so on and so forth.

[DeathArrow]

>C# feels kinda nice because it's a good balance.

From my experience it's awesome to write C# with AI. But both Opus and GLM usually one shot the modification to the file so I didn't experienced cases lately where AI had to fix compile errors. True, I gave the AI agents the lsp for C#, so maybe that helps.

[pier25]

Yeah C# is fantastic. I also love EF.

I stopped using it because overall it feels like Microsoft has lost the plot with .NET.

[stephbook]

What I hate about .NET is the atrocious naming.

Net Core, Net Framework, Net Common Core, .NET..

And God forbid any of these frameworks ever expose what they are in a config file. You start a project, hand it to a colleague and he can't figure out whether it's Framework or Core by looking at the files. You Google and are immediately bombarded by 15 year old threads.

[Kwpolska]

If you start a project with .NET Framework in 2026, you're doing it wrong, plain and simple.

And the .csproj files do tell you which .NET they are.

<TargetFrameworkVersion>v4.</TargetFrameworkVersion> or <TargetFramework>net4</TargetFramework> is the old framework. Also, if the file is an unreadable mess listing all .cs files, it's generally .NET Framework.

<TargetFramework>netstandard2.0</TargetFramework> is .NET Standard 2.0, which means this library can be consumed from either Framework or modern .NET.

And finally, <TargetFramework>netX.0</TargetFramework> (X >= 5) is the modern .NET.

[CharlieDigital]

Forget about the old stuff; just use .NET 10.

It's really, really good now. DX is fantastic. Yes, the hot-reload will probably never match that of interpreted languages, but for a compiled language, it is good.

File-based apps are easy to get started with: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/fundamentals...

EF is solid and proven. Easy, low-lift type safety end-to-end from DB up with very good perf.

Tooling is dead simple and consistent; `dotnet build`, `dotnet test`, `dotnet run`, `dotnet ef database update`, `dotnet ef migrations add`, `dotnet tool restore`. No mix of build tools and toolchains.

[pier25]

Never tried .NET 10 but hot-reload was garbage with .NET 9 and 8.

It failed very often and you had to manually restart the dev process. Even when it worked, it was no where as fast as eg using Bun with TS.

Also Minimal APIs didn't have feature parity vs MVC even 4 years after release which is quite frankly insane. I hear in .NET 10 they've finally added some validation. Not sure how it compares to something like FluentValidation which still is one of the most downloaded nuget packages.

[DeathArrow]

Most web projects use JSON files for configuration. There are also some XML files for project configuration. If anything, you can run into too much configuration files.

[bsder]

Yeah, I mean, if I'm going to step away from the Python ecosystem and let AI manage/polyfill my dependencies, I might as well shift the whole way to OCaml/F# rather than Rust.

Then I get the benefits of GC and strong typing.

[hocuspocus]

I think the AI/ML ecosystem is a bit of a mess overall, things tend to work out of the box in Python because that's what everyone targets, but it doesn't necessarily say that much about maturity and robustness.

In Rust you can use many C++ frameworks like libtorch or ONNX or specialized libraries (llama.cpp, whisper.cpp ...) via their bindings. Native projects such as Candle or Burn are not feature complete yet, but I assume they'll eventually get there and drive bigger communities compared to C++.

[dev360]

Definitively something to be said for AI/ML library support. I find myself going with Rust / TS for a ton of my backend work lately though, even though I'm a huge Django fan for backend.

[parpfish]

i think the enforcing the type system is good with AI for a couple reasons: - (speculating) typed language have faster/better LSPs that can be used to more efficiently modify code with tool use. - when a human DOES need to step in and start investigating/modifying the code, the strong typing makes it much easier to get oriented within their spaghetticode

[mountainriver]

I think the only use cases are when it wraps low level C++ libs like ML libraries, and yes those are extremely difficult to reproduce