[bhouston]

.NET seems to have regularly changed the garbage collector over the years and I do not remember any similar surprises in production. I wonder why they have had better experience?

I thought that by now dynamic garbage collection was a known quantity so that making changes, outside of out right bugs, is fairly safe and predictable?

[stackskipton]

One thing Microsoft does really well is eating its own dogfood and Microsoft feeds a ton of .Net dogs.

So any change to GC starts with massive .Net MSFT code base so they get extremely good telemetry back about any downsides and might be able to fix it in time.

[pjmlp]

Did really well, unfortunately.

There is almost no dog fooding on Windows development since version 8, Typescript team rather rewrite the compiler in Go, Azure has plenty of Go, Rust and Java projects alongside .NET.

[stackskipton]

Microsoft does use Go/Rest/Java in places but they still have a ton of .Net.

Windows Development is not "We are not dogfooding", it's that incentives are misaligned with customer wants.

.Net team incentives are aligned with customer wants, provide a language that is highly performant and easy enough to write.

[pjmlp]

Oh, they really don't dogfood Windows development any longer, regardless of the incentives.

I have my WinRT 8, UAP 8.1, UWP 10, Project Reunion, .NET Native, C++/CX, C++/WinRT, XAML Islands, XAML Direct, WinUI 2.0, WinUi 3.0, WinAppSDK and what not scars to prove how they aren't dog fooding any piece of it in any meaningful manner.

Heck they keep talking about C++ support in WinUI 3, as if the team hasn't left the project and is now playing with Rust instead.

They managed that plenty of early WinRT advocates became their hardest critics, while not believing anything else they put out, like now this Windows K2 project.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

Well, .NET is just not in the same class as Go and Rust.

Go is, essentially, nearly perfect at what it does - even if the language itself leaves much to be desired and would ideally be much safer.

Microsoft should up their game. They have a few research languages in development.

They've always been great with languages. Hopefully, they rise to the occassion.

[pjmlp]

The only thing Go has going for it was getting lucky with Docker and co, and UNIX/Plan 9/Inferno pedigree.

Now we're stuck with it in anything CNCF related.

[jaapz]

I like my programming language flame wars just as much as the next guy but Go is a really easy language to get started with, while also being very fast. It's not just luck

[pjmlp]

> The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers. They’re typically, fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt.

-- Rob Pike

[stackskipton]

What? If you are talking web development, .Net is just about the same as Go. It's 100% Java OOP type writing but result is same, very performant API server.

Sure, Rust is completely different beast with different target system.

[pjmlp]

Java 1.5 kind of thing, with plenty error handling boilerplate, errors as strings, and SCM urls straight in the code...

[Weryj]

Actually there’s a change to dotnet 9 with how it handles the heap and GC which caused major issues for us.

I’ll confess the reason it hit us so hard is because the code quality was so low and wasteful on allocations that it didn’t hide the problem as well as previous versions.

[chihuahua]

I remember working on the Windows Update back-end at Microsoft around 2005, and we had a problem where it would freeze up periodically, and not surprisingly that turned out to be caused by GC. But we noticed it before shipping, and we just tweaked some GC parameters.

So I think it was not a big problem for .Net because it gave you enough control over GC, and because people tested their code before putting it in production.

[bmitc]

.NET and the CLR was actually designed by computer scientists and experts, not so for Python.