Opinions on C# and .NET


After my recent exposure to C#, I thought I’d write up my thoughts about it and .NET. These will all mostly be in comparison with Java, rather then Ruby – since the implementation is a port of a Java project.

C# and Java started out very similar to each other. They still are, really. But they have grown in different directions. Some things are very nice, some things seem nice, but I didn’t use them, and some things are really problematic. When reading this, I might come of as harsh on C# and .NET. That’s not really my intent – Java and the JVM has its problems too, and I wouldn’t dare to suggest whether C# or Java is better.

The largest difference between C# and Java that really made a large change for me was that C# doesn’t have local anonymous classes. Java has, and these are highly useful. Of course, C# has delegates with lambda expressions instead, and they solve much the same problem. But there are two problems with delegates that make it impossible to use them for all cases. First, an anonymous type in Java can implement several interdependent methods. You can factor behavior local to that piece of code. That doesn’t work with delegates. Instead you’ll have to resort to ugly hacks (in Ioke I make each NativeMethod have references to two different delegates that interact with each other). The second problem is once again the question of intent. I spoke about this in the last post, and I will mention it again. Interfaces are about intent, and they get less useful if you can’t express intent well with them. That’s why the generic Func delegates might not be a good solution in all cases.

The second thing I noticed was the proliferation of “primitive” types. I knew at some level that C# had unsigned and signed versions of things, but I’d forgotten it. It’s actually pretty nice to have those available.

Enums in C# are quite bad compared to Java. The main distinction is that they are based on integers. This gives some fairly strange results in some cases. The one that really bit me was when I forgot to give a default value to an enum field – and expected the default to be null. That isn’t true. The default value for an enum will be the value in it that maps to 0 – which is usually the first element of the enum list. I recommend people using enums to always explicitly init them.

Extension methods seem very useful, and they have been used to add some really nice things in the .NET core library. That said, I didn’t use them for my implementation, so I don’t have any real experience with them.

One thing that really surprised me about .NET was that there is still no support for arbitrary precision math – neither big nums nor big decimals. I ended up implementing that myself, so now there is at least one open source library with liberal license that people can use.

Same thing with regular expressions. The implementation in .NET obviously works, but there are too many incompatibilities in the implementation. Especially the handling of named groups is so different I couldn’t get it to work for Ioke. I ended up implementing NRegex, which is a perl5.6 compatible regular expression engine. It supports named groups, is thread safe, supports look ahead and look behind, and is compliant with level 1 of Unicode Regular Expression Guidelines.

At the end of the day, it was an interesting experience, and nothing surprised me that much. Not really. Most of the things are nitpicks. If it weren’t for one small detail…

Namely equality and hash codes for collections. Why in the name of anything holy doesn’t .NET provide implementations for Equals and GetHashCode? In this day and age? Even if it was a mistake from the beginning, why couldn’t they have fixed that when adding the generic collections? I don’t expect to have to implement these things myself. I especially don’t expect to have to provide my own subclasses of any collection I need to work with. This seriously annoyed me, and made the whole thing take some time, since the bugs produced by it was very hard to pinpoint. And oh yeah, when we’re talking about collections, it’s good to keep in mind that ArrayList.Sort is _not_ stable. It’s using quick sort. If you want a stable sort you’ll have to implement a merge sort or something like that for yourself. This also came as a surprise to me, but it was easily found at least. Since I had a pretty good test suite… =)

Anyway. That’s it.