I get why people used to shit on Microsoft, but Microsoft has demonstrated over a number of years that its changed under Satya.
> However the way that this always works is that there is a base that can be written in, but anything non-trivial will have pulled in something that, surprise surprise, is Windows only.
Outside of desktop GUIs, this is simply not true. I'm writing complex, cross-platform systems that work just fine on Windows and Linux (and would on MacOS if I chose to target it).
Hell, even a lot of the tooling is now cross-platform: Visual Studio Code, Azure Data Studio, even Visual Studio and Xamarin run on MacOS!
The .net 5 announcement was very clear that .net core is the future and its been a while since you’ve had needed things that are windows only to build a non-trivial .net core application.
Yes, you can write a non-trivial .NET application on Linux. But if you take a non-trivial .NET application that runs on Windows, the odds are low that it can easily be ported to Linux. And there are almost no non-trivial .NET applications that weren't originally written for Windows.
The result is that if you work with .NET, you're going to be pushed towards Windows.
.NET 5 should supersede both Core and Framework IIRC
In the years since, I've encountered many stories that attempted to make use of that portability. All failed.
I've seen the promise of portability with other software stacks, and know how hard it is. I also know that taking software that was not written to be portable, and then making it portable, is massively harder than writing it to be portable from scratch.
So, based on both the history of .NET and general knowledge, I won't believe that .NET will actually wind up being portable until I hear stories in the wild of people porting non-trivial projects to Linux with success. And I will discount all announcements that suggest the contrary.
Microsoft didn’t have anything to do with Mono until 2016.
If you start from scratch with a greenfield .Net Core project there aren’t really any issues getting it to work cross platform.
While I’ll agree that anything that uses any of the advanced features of Entity Framework and MVC is not trivially ported.
So yes, even in a new project, there will be a pull back to Windows. Because virtually nothing is truly written from scratch.
You’re not going to mistakenly add a non .Net Core Nuget package to a .Net Core project. It won’t even compile.
Of course you can find Windows only nuget packages for Windows only functionality like TopShelf - a package to make creating a Windows Service easy. But even then, I’ve taken the same solution and deployed it to both a Windows server and an AWS Linux based lambda just by configuring the lambda to use a different entry point (lambda handler) than the Windows server.
You can even cross compile a standalone Windows application on Linux and vice versa.
I use a Linux Docker container to build both packages via AWS CodeBuild.
Would you also criticize Python for not being cross platform because there are some Windows only modules?
Yes, yes. I know that Microsoft theoretically open sourced and ported it. However the way that this always works is that there is a base that can be written in, but anything non-trivial will have pulled in something that, surprise surprise, is Windows only.
Otherwise I agree that it is a better Java.