“C#, it’s just not portable”

http://www.fastchicken.co.nz/2011/09/15/c-its-just-not-portable/

by DonnyV • 15 years ago

94 35 15 years ago

fastchicken.co.nz

jinushaun• 15 years ago

Interesting. I always thought the Vita was running Android since it supports Android apps.

Are you sure about this. Reading their press release leads me to believe it's the other way around, that by developing for the Vita SDK, you can cross compile to Android if you choose.

Supporting C# as the programming language, PS Suite SDK can run programs developed in C# on virtual machine equipped on both PS Certified devices and PS Vita. By supporting development for multiple devices and by adopting libraries to create a variety of content not only limited to games, PS Suite SDK will not only help developers save their cost in creating new content but also allow them to efficiently create their content on one SDK and without having to create on several different SDKs.

Through PS Suite SDK, SCE will provide to game developers and publishers the potential to further expand their business opportunities to Android based portable devices.

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/sony-computer-entert...

drivebyacct2• 15 years ago

You might be able to write C# and target different platforms, but I've yet to be convinced that a codebase can be shared across platforms as easily as some other languages/platforms.

DrJokepu4• 15 years ago

We run non-trivial, large, unmodified .NET 4 C# ASP.NET MVC web apps (compiled on Windows) on Mac Mini Servers on OS X with Mono and Apache. Never had a single problem. It's almost creepy how well it works.

zwp• 15 years ago

That's interesting. Why do you do this?

jcromartie• 15 years ago

Just like most languages, you can take some subset of C# and run it in many places. And, like most languages, there is some corner of the language that doesn't work on one platform or another. And most importantly, just like most languages, you end up depending on various libraries which may or may not be tied to hardware which makes significant parts of non-trivial applications non-portable.

People don't make games in C# because it's C#. They make games using C# and XNA, or Unity, or some other framework. They don't make web apps in C#, but rather in (whatever flavor of) ASP.NET. And it turns out that these frameworks are the important bits.

So when you choose to write something in C#, you are probably going to be choosing a framework that ties you down to a platform, and that's where the cross-platform nature of the language kind of becomes irrelevant.

That's my experience, at least.

If Clojure takes off on other runtimes, it will have this issue too. The JVM is it's "home" platform, and most Clojure software depends on JVM libraries, like how the vast majority of the C# software written thus far depends on Microsoft (and therefore Windows) libraries.

berntb• 15 years ago

>>If Clojure takes off on other runtimes, it will have this issue too. The JVM is it's "home" platform, and most Clojure software depends on JVM libraries, like how the vast majority of the C# software written thus far depends on Microsoft (and therefore Windows) libraries.

There is a small difference.

The Clojure/JVM runtime is ported to quite a lot of operating systems, where it runs quite well.

evilduck3• 15 years ago

You can use C# everywhere, but in practice it just seems like a huge effort to avoid learning a new language to me.

I have nothing against the language (writing C# is half of my day job), but all of these bridges are second-class citizens and built and maintained at the mercy of third parties just to interface with your target platform. Apple will never release updates for MonoMac or MonoTouch. Google isn't going to release C# Android SDKs or documentation. Mono for Linux always trails the Windows version and has significant community resistance, and Microsoft isn't going to integrate and maintain these bridges.

You're also always losing something in the translation too, be it idiomatic style of the target API or C#, or being totally cut off from new native features, or severely restricting what community support or documentation is available to you. Any way you cut it, it's a second class experience. Worse, some of the bridges aren't free. You get to pay $400 for the privilege of not learning a little bit of Java or ObjC to get MonoTouch for Android or iOS.

C# is good, but it's not so good that I refuse to learn other tools.

stonemetal2• 15 years ago

While I fully agree with the losing something in translation. I don't agree that people are trying to skip learning things. It is a do I want to do 100% of my software development 3 times because I need a java version for one platform, Objective-C for the second and C# for the third.

Oddly enough it seems like C++ is the only language all three platforms support natively.

evilduck3• 15 years ago

Mono for iOS and Android and MonoMac for OSX all have different API calls for their respective platforms. GTK# is its own thing too. You might avoid a total rewrite from scratch, but the UI is going to need significant tailoring to each platform still. And it's not like Java, ObjC, and C# are radically different from one another.

Does keeping C# as a constant really solve this problem? (I honestly don't know, I've never done a multiplatform product like this)

stephth• 15 years ago

Oddly enough it seems like C++ is the only language all three platforms support natively.

Indeed. But it's also quite harder than those to develop in.

I hate to keep on button-mashing, but it would be a big win to have a PlusPlusScript language - as in same philosophy and approach as CoffeeScript, but targeting C++ [1].

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2989936

frou_dh• 15 years ago

MonoDevelop on the Mac bothers me. Even though the apps you create can be proper (and they emphasise that fact), the IDE itself screams "this is a second-class environment" by looking and feeling nothing like a Mac app.

rbranson• 15 years ago

... which corresponds with the state of almost every IDE on OS X.

kitsune_2• 15 years ago

A lot of people just like C#. I think it's fair to say that it's a well designed language. It also depends on the task at hand and your personal preferences. I had to develop a couple of iPhone apps and in the process I've developed a pretty strong dislike for Objective-C (mainly its syntax, stupid, I know) - in the future I'd probably try MonoTouch.

Many people also tend to prefer the language they're strongest in when they need to get things done, especially when they don't know the other languages and frameworks that well.

In my case, I'm a Windows / C# guy at work, at home my laptop is running ArchLinux and I use it to code in a variety of languages. This didn't prevent me from trying to set up a mono / asp.net mvc app with nginx and postgresql on it :)

aespinoza• 15 years ago

I don't really think it is about refusing to learn other tools. My opinion is about choice.

I work with C# 90% of the time. I also happen to use other languages fluently. I think is a matter of choice.(I also have to admit that there are some developers that just don't want to get out of the comfort zone, but I don't think ALL C3 developers should be judged this way).

For example, I have used Xamarin products for a some projects, and it makes a lot more sense for me, to use C# with Xamarin products than Objective-C. That is a language I have been avoiding for a long time. And the reasons are not the scope of this comment. On the Android side I am definitely using Java.

So cutting to the chase, I think that for a company to support C# without Microsoft involvement is not bad, and it doesn't mean that ALL developers are lazy or mediocre, it just means more choices for developers. Specially if you have big investments in Software developed on C# (either .Net or Mono).

SomeCallMeTim• 15 years ago

>C# is good, but it's not so good that I refuse to learn other tools.

To me it's too heavy. About 10Mb too heavy.

Apple and Android don't ship a "standard" Mono runtime, so you end up having to ship one with your app.

The sweet spot for me is to use Lua: I can build it anywhere that you can build C, and it's TINY. If I want speed I use C++; for the rest I script in a really forgiving multi-paradigm language.

peterknego• 15 years ago

You could make the same argument about C, which exists on much more platforms than C#.

But writing in C does not make a program portable. Neither does writing it in C#.

So yes, C# compiler might be portable, but programs written in C# are not.

So yes, C# compiler might be portable, but C# programs are not.

nathanb• 15 years ago

These days it seems like much of a language's benefit to developers comes from its libraries rather than from the elegance of its syntax or the ease of implementing an algorithm. The big question is, how much of the "standard" libraries are supported on these devices? I remember writing a C# application using Winforms back mid-last-decade and assuming that portability would be a cinch...right up until I realized that Winforms weren't supported by Mono yet and I was supposed to use Glade# or some such nonsense. C#'s mindshare mostly comes from Windows GUI developers, and telling these folks that they can use their pet language only if they relearn all the libraries isn't going to be much of a win, I don't think.

funkah• 15 years ago

I feel like there is too much attention paid these days to who badmouthed your precious programming language, or whether your language has the appropriate amount of respect, or whatever. I'm a C# dev, sometimes. People have been hating on it (and its devs) for years, but it just doesn't matter. Get over it and use whatever language or other dev tool you want.

mattgreenrocks• 15 years ago

Usually, hate-ons are perpetuated by those who lack the skills to make shit happen. Or, at least, that's been my experience. They're usually more concerned with Being Right On The Internet than anything else.

sgt• 15 years ago

I am currently writing an "enterprise" style application and backend framework (WCF, Fluent NHibernate, Castle, json-emitting webservices, etc) based on C# and Mono. I'd like to hear more stories of others doing the same. Mono has all the functionality I need, the only possible worry that I have is that of the default GC (and I don't know if the newer GC is stable enough).

qusiba• 15 years ago

C# as a system language running on Mono is actually usable. But the thing is, I've never seen an IDE worse than MonoDevelop. Writing C# without Visual Studio, a large part of the benefit of the language just disappears.

I would only use C# for window jobs, although I sincerely think it's a beautiful language.

sreque• 15 years ago

C# is a good production language. It lets twiddle you your bits almost as well as C when you need to, provides a decent OO model, and has been piling on more functional and dynamic features as the years go by. However, as someone who has had to port a .Net C# app from windows to Linux, I can witness with sincerity that C# is NOT very portable.

First of all, a lot of the C# APIs are written with windows in mind. An example is system mutexes. These just don't exist on Linux, and the mono implementation to emulate them is very buggy. Another example is the process counter API. Although much of this same information is available on Linux via the Proc table, Mono provides no equivalent API because it would be a lot of work to make one that works on all the Unix variants. There are many such examples of C#'s windows-centric API not being ported well in Mono.

A bigger problem with Mono is that it just wasn't stable for us. The more standard library features we used, the more it would core dump on Linux even though it would never crash on windows. We ended up re-implementing a lot of functionality available in the standard library ourselves before the program stabilized on mono, which further incriminates the Mono stack. As a final note, we tried multiple versions of Mono, including 2.4, 2.6, and 2.10, and none of them worked well for us.

If you want to write a fairly performant cross-platform app, the JVM is still a much better place to play in right now than .Net, even though I like C# the language a lot more than I do Java. You can also go the route of combining your favorite scripting language with C for the CPU-intensive parts.

knotty66• 15 years ago

Is anybody using Mono on Linux for ASP.NET MVC3 apps in production?

If so, is it stable, fast?

I wonder how it compares speed and stability wise to the Java Play Framework.

I am currently using Play (and it's great!) but I much prefer C# as a language to Java ...

“C#, it’s just not portable”

Related Stories