The original thread is on the devil’s website and I don’t want to direct traffic to it, so here’s a link to the tweet instead:
https://twitter.com/davidfowl/status/1671351948640129024?s=46&t=OEG0fcSTxko2ppiL47BW1Q
For me either:
- Versioning and naming. Framework 4.8.0 -> works down to Windows Server 2012; Framework 4.8.1 -> whoops you need Server 2021. Why.
- Bugs and regressions in its APIs and tools. Most are related to UI and accessibility as you probably guessed.
- VS. It has been slow and bug-ridden for a long time now, but just recently I hit that bug where searching text doesn’t find all places. I might have hit it before, but how would you know. It also feels like its tools are sometimes worse than in its previous versions. Suggestions got worse, for sure. But that might come down to my other points.
- Rather ad hoc, unfocussed language design and the problems that result. Better than many others, but still. Not learning (enough) from the past seems to be a common theme in PL design, but it sure doesn’t help that it isn’t an exact science.
- Anything UI.
TBH I wouldn’t recommend you be building applications in .Net Framework… Most complaints about it have been a solved problem for years with .Net Core/.Net 5+. And there are upgrade paths, at least if you aren’t maintaining WPF/Winforms
Bugs and regressions? I wonder if that’s for different things than I touch, I’ve had almost no disruptions for the last 9 years. But I’ve mostly worked on console apps and backends. Almost no UI work aside from some WPF and Winforms side projects ages ago.
Well, a migration wasn’t an option for our project. But I’ve been trying Windows Forms with .Net 6, but the experience wasn’t that great, either. And it was basic, first-five-minutes stuff like the form designer not opening.
Microsoft might have announced the end of their own UI story just recently, but to me, it felt always half-assed.
Type system rigidity, I started using TypeScript a lot over the last few years with FE work. TS is so much more flexible and expressive. I really wish that I could express constraints in C# as fluently as I can in TS
Enums really need more flexibility, unions, discriminated unions, left hand implicit type, better value support…etc
System.Text.Json still sucks, it’s not greedy, no global setting , non-sane default,no expando support…etc it’s awful to use.
Unstructured data in general is an absolute pain to work with.
Composability of tests is still super painful and verbose. Dynamic test generation is awkward and unergonomic. After doing testing and other languages that let you simply compose tests imperatively, C# testing is definitely painful.
IMHO C# is an acceptable language with an absolutely fantastic framework.
I love C#, but these are my primary gripes
A Lemmy post that contains a tweet that contains a Reddit comment. Quite a ride.
Well, like most people who haven’t used .NET, I have very strong opinions about it.
The first and main issue I take with it is how it’s all capitalised. Second but not less, it’s such a generic name. Am I gonna get websites in the .net domain or do I have to learn Google search beyond typing random junk, pressing enter, and hoping for a stackoverflow answer that works?
You’ll eventually get used to different casing conventions in different languages that’s just something that you have to mature into.
Depending on the language you are writing the conventions will be different, it’s often within your best interests to adopt to those conventions instead of trying to fight against them.
The things I bump in the most:
- Mutability. Everything is passed by ref so imutable and/or copy should be an important factor of the language, but it’s not. Struct vs class also was way to much impact but can both be used for an interface argument but have such different flow.
- Compatibility is always favored over improvement in the framework design and language. It has obvious pros as we need less porting, but newer functions in the language are often weird to work with and frameworks get replaced instead of improved, making the porting even harder.
- A lot of features work magically simple until you want some kind of custom behavior and they then become unmanageable complex. Like the default XML serializer where you can do no extension and everything can get serialized, or async function that abstract the threading untill you want to manage multiple parallel function with error checking and you get very weird and confusing code. Thay all work magically easy as long as you use them for nothing more difficult than the examples.
Dotnet had really been the ecosystem i keep coming back to. It’s been so frictionless. It could be experience, but I really never feel like I’m fighting with it. Running plain C might be the only other ecosystem that I would hold as a less frictionless experience. I genuinely don’t hold any frustrations with it. I don’t have any ideological problems around Microsoft’s involvement. The tool lets me solve problems effectively.
The only thing Im missing is a good llvm target for the clr something like what the kotlin native guys enjoy so i can take the ecosystems to new places.
Sure EFcore can be tiresome and LINQ is inefficiënt. But I’m going to be honest here. If you’re trying to squeeze performance out of an ORM and you’re running up against performance limits of LINQ, maybe not use a time-saving tool as a power tool?
Maybe I’m simping a bit over it, but I’m not seeing alot of positive content about a tool that has only been very productive in my experience. Maybe because all of the dotnet users are too busy solving actual problems for people haha 😂
Oh and newtonsoft… And maybe xUnit and nUnit could make up and figure out a way to be ergonomic AND work well multi-threaded.
Performance limits of LINQ…?
You’re getting nearly the same performance out of loopes generated by LINQ as you would normal for loops.
If you’re referring to LINQ and EF Core, you’re generation SQL with it, not running LINQ. And that query generation is incredibly performant these days (I think EF 7 was something like 5% slower than dapper?).
So luckily you can squeeze a ton of performance out of it!
To be fair .NET is open source only recently and Avalonia UI is only catching up. More and more people will discover it eventually.
And Microsoft behaviour is also to be blamed. What is a free and full fledged IDE for .NET? VSCode comes close but is no match to VS.
And web bros will notice once Blazor hits on. It will though, right?
I also feel like it was yesterday but .NET Core was announced in 2014.
True! But being open source and being useful enough are two different things.
When you have no ethics and just care about results you can also go fishing with dynamite…
That being said I didn’t know dotnet was now open source. So that’s a good point.
It’s been entirely open source for 7 years now…
