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0 pointstomkarho1y ago0 comments

> It's fully-cross platform

To a point. Making cross platform native desktop apps is still in the hands of 3rd party vendors such as Avalonia and Uno. MAUI was supposed to fix that oversight to a less than stellar results.

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rahkiin1y ago

That is like saying C is not cross platform because there is not a library for making desktop apps that use native components on all those platforms.

quietbritishjim1y ago

If there were an old version of C that only worked on one platform but had a graphical toolkit in its standard library, and a new version of C that is cross platform but that graphical toolkit is now ambiguously still sort-of part of the standard library but still not cross platform (and there was no realistic alternative)... Then yes it would be valid to object C is not really cross platform.

pantalaimon1y ago

back when .NET was first launched it was advertised as the new way of making desktop applications on Windows. Visual C# made it very easy to design GUI interfaces.

So this "it's all for backend now" notion is surprising.

toyg1y ago

.Net is "Microsoft Java". Like Java it was designed to do everything, but as desktop development died (and mobile development was locked down by Apple and Google, limiting it to their corporate languages), it pivoted towards networked applications.

chgs1y ago

Visual J++ was Microsoft’s Java

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lelanthran1y ago

Same with java - designed for embedded set top devices, pivoted to backend services.

kuschku1y ago

.NET/C#'s competitor JVM/Kotlin does provide a UI framework (Jetbrains Compose) that runs on iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, Linux, and the web.

That's what you have to compare against, and .NET/C# falls flat.

pjc501y ago

That's also not part of the JVM or the Java language.

notpushkin1y ago

Jetbrains is a third party vendor here, too.

kuschku1y ago

A third party vendor for the Kotlin language? Kotlin has replaced Java as C#'s largest competitor, so that's what we should be comparing against.

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neonsunset1y ago

No and it's not even close. Kotlin only has a single Jetbrains Compose (I presume Kotlin Multiplatform is the same thing). It is also subject to the quirks and specifics of JVM implementations, build-systems and package management. Kotlin native partially bypasses this, but its performance is a factor of 0.1-0.01x vs OpenJDK (if there is new data - please let me know). This is very unlike NativeAOT which is on average within 90% of CoreCLR JIT but is also a performance improvement in variety of scenarios.

C# and F# get to enjoy the integration that is "much closer to the metal" as well as much richer cross-platform GUI frameworks ecosystem with longer history.

kuschku1y ago

Which rich cross-platform GUI frameworks are you talking about?

Win32? Silverlight/Blend? XAML? MAUI? They're all windows only.

Gtk? Qt? Sure, they exist, but they're ancient and limited to long outdated paradigms.

I don't know if you can get QtQuick with KDE Kirigami to work on .NET, otherwise that might be one option.

Kotlin Multiplatform is btw a solution for building the same code for kotlin native, JVM and web to target all the OSes at the same time.

While Jetpack Compose is the Android Version of Compose, Compose Multiplatform is Compose for Kotlin Multiplatform.

> subject to the quirks and specifics of JVM implementations, build-systems and package management

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.

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