What is .NET, and why should you choose it?
published on 2023/02/15
The .NET design point can be boiled down to being effective and efficient in both the safe domain (where everything is productive) and in the unsafe domain (where tremendous functionality exists). .NET is perhaps the managed environment with the most built-in functionality, while also offering the lowest cost to interop with the outside world, with no tradeoff between the two. In fact, many features exploit this seamless divide, building safe managed APIs on the raw power and capability of the underlying OS and CPU.
We can expand on the design point a bit more:
- Productivity is the foremost design consideration across runtime, libraries, language, and tools.
- Safe code is the primary compute model, while unsafe code enables additional manual optimizations.
- Static and dynamic code are both supported, enabling a broad set of distinct scenarios.
- Native code interop and hardware intrinsics are low cost and high-fidelity (raw API and instruction access).
- Code is portable across platforms (OS, chip architecture), while platform targeting enables specialization and optimization.
- Adaptability across programming domains (cloud, client, gaming) is enabled with specialized implementations of the general-purpose programming model.
- Industry standards like OpenTelemetry and gRPC are favored over bespoke solutions.
[Microsoft DevBlogs[(https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/why-dotnet/)
This is a really good overview on the .NET platform.