It′s mid-fall which means a new version of C# is coming soon. It′s time to find out what updates will soon appear in the language. Although C#12 has fewer features than previous versions, it still...
  • douglasg14b@programming.dev
    81·
    11 months ago

    I do feel like C# saw C++ and said “let’s do that” in a way.

    One of the biggest selling points about the language is the long-term and cross repo/product/company…etc consistency. Largely the language will be very recognizable regardless of where it’s written and by who it’s written due to well established conventions.

    More and more ways to do the same thing but in slightly different ways is nice for the sake of choices but it’s also making the language less consistent and portable.

    While at the same time important language features like discriminated unions are still missing. Things that other languages have started to build features for by default. C# is incredibly “clunky” in comparison to say Typescript solely from a type system perspective. The .Net ecosystem of course more than makes up for any of this difference, but it’s definitely not as enjoyable to work with the language itself.

    • Thinker@lemmy.world
      3·
      11 months ago

      I certainly see where you’re coming from, but I think the designers of C# have done fairly good job evolving the language to balance backwards compatibility, simplicity (in terms of having “only one way” to do things), and the ergonomics expected of modern languages. I think C++ and JS are great comparisons because C++ has at this point added everything and the kitchen sink to it’s language and standard library, whereas C# has gone much more like JS introducing features that evolve the best practices for writing but still feel and read like essentially the same language. For example, primary constructors still look just like regular C#, it’s just a nicer way to define simple POCOs when desired.

      As far as important language features, I think it’s easy to pick on discriminated unions because it seems like C#’s users unanimously want that. However, if you read through proposals and discussions, it’s obvious that there’s a lot of nuance and trade offs in deciding how and what form of discriminated unions should exist in C# (and the designers are very active in working through that nuance and trade off - they said they have a working group that meets weekly to discuss it I believe*). And to be fair, they have introduced a LOT of other important features (like records and the vastly improved pattern matching) in just the last few years. Without those features, discriminated unions wouldn’t be nearly as appealing, and those features are great for the language even without DUs.

      *Edit: Source for my claim is the recent Languages & Runtime Community Standup on the official dotnet YouTube channel. Mads talks about the working group at 21:05, but the discussion of discriminated unions begins at 7:09.

    • TehPers@beehaw.orgEnglish
      1·
      11 months ago

      I think one of the things holding back some of the more impactful features we could see in C# is the need to also update the CLR in many cases to handle things like new kinds of types, new kinds of expressions, etc. TypeScript has the benefit of being executed by a dynamic runtime, but C#'s runtime is unfortunately statically typed, meaning it also needs to be updated with the language. It’s also used by multiple languages, for what it’s worth.

      That being said, if they redirected some of their efforts towards improving the CLR as well, I think they could put out all the cool features they’ve mostly sidelined, like DUs and some form of their extension everything proposal.

    • douglasg14b@programming.dev
      3·
      11 months ago

      The great thing about languages like C# is that you really don’t need to “catch up”. It’s incredibly stable and what you know about C#8 (Really could get away with C# 6 or earlier) is more than enough to get you through the grand majority of personal and enterprise programming needs for the next 5-10 years.

      New language versions are adding features, improving existing ones, and improving on the ergonomics. Not necessarily breaking or changing anything before it.

      That’s one of the major selling points really, stability and longevity. Without sacrificing performance, features, or innovation.

  • Corngood@lemmy.ml
    2·
    11 months ago

    I’m sure a lot of work went into this, but it seems crazy that we need another way to initialise collections, and another way to make fixed sized arrays.

    I just want less boilerplate.

  • AdamBomb@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    2·
    11 months ago

    Nice, primary constructors are one of my favorite little QoL features of writing objects in F#. Cool to see it come to C#.