alt Hacker NewsThe fact that when most devs look at C#, they can only see the silhouette of Microsoft is kind of making me mad sometimes, but I think it is understandable.
The corporate history of C# is undeniably strong, and even till this day in modern C#, they still have a lot of legacy components in it, like AppDomain, APM and MarshalByRefObject.
It is also unfortunately that C# has largely lost in the AI race, that it failed to gain tractions from AI developers despite heavy investments from Microsoft. Early AI stuff like Semantic Kernel actually included C# as its primary languages besides from Python. Nowadays it is not mentioned so much and the default is just Python but perhaps it really isn't a fair comparison due to the gravity of Python in AI as a whole.
Yet for another fact that even within Microsoft, Rust wins over C# for agentic development, is a clear indication that C# has lost a meaningful place in software development as its former parent started to berate it as well. TypeScript is rewritten in Go rather than C#, and consider the fact that Anders Hejlsberg made both C# and TypeScript...
Sure, maybe Bing and a large part of Azure and Xbox services still have heavily relying on it, probably because of ASP.NET Core and Orleans, but outside of the two Microsoft greenhouses, it is a free for all battle royale where C# don't even have a chance of being picked at due to being too weak.
I even tried to contribute a C# SDK to the Restate project, but the maintainers actively rejected it due to them not being familiar and refused the handover. They said they will consider if there are commercial fundings backing it, then they would starting to consider (that's even with money attached they would still think about it). This also shows how unpopular C#/dotnet is among open source development and failed to build hype. The same Restate project even have a Java SDK for it, so it is not like they can't handle C#, they just didn't like to.
The last few thing C# is good at is just Unity I'm afraid, and that is also dying too as Unity is also not doing so well lately.
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Semantic Kernel isn't getting updates because they've replaced it with Agent Framework.
Rust and C# serve different purposes. For things like CLI tooling and the Copilot SDK (supports Go, Python, JS/TS, Java, .NET), Rust makes total sense.
For web API backends and MCP servers, I firmly believe C# is the better choice.
For AI use cases (as in make calls to LLMs), there's not much difference, IMO from Python and C# and TypeScript. At the end of the day, those are all just REST API calls and SDKs are mostly wrappers around it.
For LoB apps where the AI/LLM is just one small leg of the actual flow, C# is still a winner, IMO, because of how good the overall stack is (e.g. EF Core). Orleans (actor model framework) is also super interesting and I'm exploring some memory/communication system based around it.