Star Short Commentary: Will Apple Go .NET?
Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Wed 4th Feb 2004 05:34 UTC
Apple According to statistics, Java continues to have the crown of the most used VM-based platform in the industry. However, Microsoft's C# and .NET gain ground every day. While C# might or might not overcome Java in the following years, the fact remains that more and more programmers want the choice of C# among their developer tools. So, where does this situation leave Apple?
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Why .NET is going to be a failure
by root on Wed 4th Feb 2004 06:02 UTC

I hope Apple isn't stupid enough to follow the .NET bandwagon. Admittedly, I'm biased against VM-based platforms in general. But I need to emphasize that .NET is/was not designed for anything but Longhorn and Longhorn applications. In other words, .NET is designed for Windows to be used by Windows for Windows developers.

Any attempt to try to circumvent that intentional design implementation will continue to be a hack. And any clone implementation, such as mono, will continue to be at the mercy of Microsoft's decision and a step or several behind Microsoft's implementations, again just like mono.

Now, Java is a different story. Java was designed to be used on a multitude of platforms right from the scratch, hence the partial reason for its mediocre acceptance. I'm vehemently against VM-based platforms in general but I'm at least lenient towards Java primarily because SUN designed it to be portable from the scratch and so we don't need hacks for different implementations on different platforms at least theoretically. So Java scores their.

.NET on the other hand is horrible restrictive and locked to one platform today, Windows. No, the Linux port is incomplete, untested, not portable, not trusted and not mature. If I had my way, VM-based platforms will be banned, at least until they are as mature, as tested, as trusted, as researched, as deployable, as fast, as resource friendly and as portable as C/C++. And we all know that will be in another 5-30years, right?