[hirvi74]

I daylight as a .NET dev professionally. I completely agree with what you have wrote, but I do not think C# is particularly unique in that regard. I would say many common compiled languages are on the same path, e.g., Swift, Java, Kotlin, etc.. As time progresses, I am finding it harder to justify using C# for a greenfield project.

[za3faran]

> As time progresses, I am finding it harder to justify using C# for a greenfield project.

Are you able to elaborate why? Just curious.

[antonymoose]

Not OP here - but for me it’s the open source ecosystem. Java just wins in terms of scope, scale, and stability.

I love C# the language, but the ecosystem is a ghetto.

[Rohansi]

I see this reason a lot but what are some actual examples of what is lacking in the .NET ecosystem vs. Java?

[davewritescode]

Large Apache ecosystem (Spark, Flink, Pinot) is completely missing and third-party SDKS (looking at you AWS) almost ALWAYS have worse SDKs. The java Kinesis consumer and producer libraries are amazing, the ones for C# are simple wrappers around the AWS APIs which means there's a few foot guns waiting for developers to run into, even if they should know better.

[Rohansi]

Good point. The majority of Apache projects are Java. Amazon is also mostly Java internally.

[Amekedl]

Dev tools. The debugger is something for example that Microsoft ostensibly keeps to their own products, and how they totally slaughtered omnisharp.

It killed my daily csharp vscode driver couple of years ago, only now catching back up somewhat, but still unusable for bigger solutions.

That move made me gravitate towards vscodium, and avoiding csharp where possible.

Microsoft's move only recently got more understandable to me, because Cursor and others basically stole vscode to establish their "empire".

[jayd16]

If you can use Jetbrains, Rider is on par with IntelliJ. From that perspective, both languages have a best in class debugger.

[369548684892826]

Rider is very good but this subthread is about the lack of open source dev tooling.

[biglyburrito]

Support for OpenAPI 3.1 in .NET sucks. Up until recently, a third-party library (Swashbuckle) has been the heavyweight, but lagged for years in supporting new features & fixing old bugs. Microsoft created a first party option (Microsoft.AspNetCore.OpenApi) that supports 3.1, but it’s nowhere near feature parity with Swashbuckle yet.

I also find serialization/deserialization to be weak in .NET. Third-party Newtonsoft was king for years, then Microsoft released System.Text.Json. Years later, it lacks feature parity, including an easy way to debug like Newtonsoft did.

[pjmlp]

Lots of implementations and industry standards, many mix Java with OpenJDK.

It is not, Java is like C, C++, JavaScript and co.

There are many implementations, the language and runtime are evolving by industry partners, you get bare metal implementations with real time GC like PTC and Aicas (doing AOT for decades), JIT caches, cloud based JIT compilers (OpenJ9 and Azul), pauseless GC, an LLVM like compiler development framework (Graal),....

There are industry standards like Microprofile and Jakarta EE, which several vendors base their frameworks and application servers on.

And a mobile phone platform, which while isn't proper Java compliant, has enough pieces into it that makes it easier to integrate Java code and libraries, than using Xamarin.

Microsoft actually bothered with ECMA during the early days, however it hasn't been updated since C# 7.3, .NET Framework 4.8.

[Rohansi]

> Microsoft actually bothered with ECMA during the early days, however it hasn't been updated since C# 7.3, .NET Framework 4.8.

I know it's not a popular opinion but I don't see why they should bother. There are already multiple implementations that serve different use cases, but they are slowly converging into one. There are more languages+runtimes which do not have formal specifications than those that do, and that's okay! Fragmentation is not a good thing.

[hirvi74]

Poor reporting libraries, PDF libraries, multiple popular open source projects have randomly gone proprietary (some after a decade+), etc..

[free652]

I mean I haven't done much in c# recently, but few examples that c# ecosystem is the subpar in quality

Kafka client library sucks, I mean it was a nightmare to make it stable and there were a few of them.

Pdfbox library

And many other libraries. If you use c# Microsoft libraries only - then you are golden. outside of that its really bad.

At this point I switched to Rust.

[JohannesH]

A good built-in/open xslt3 processor.

[hirvi74]

GP here.

What I meant is that I try to be pragmatic when writing applications. Most languages solve most problems with relatively minor differences between them.

Of course, some languages excel in areas few or others do not. When it comes to C#, I struggle to justify when it is the “right tool for the right job.” If I were building a game in Unity, C# makes sense as it’s the only option. But if I were to build, I do not know, a FizzBuzz Widget, why use C# over any other language?

The only answer I can usually come up with is language familiarity. My employer’s answer to that question would be, “Because C# is a Microsoft product.”