# C# and .NET

42 Hacker News commenters recommended C# and .NET and 4 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 10 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 5 years (3 owners). It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Free, open-source, cross-platform language and runtime that people praise for fast performance, strong libraries, and productive daily use; critics cite slow feature development and awkward OS calls.

## Why people recommend it

- Productive and pleasant to use (6 comments): "was a breath of fresh air after TS. Each iteration just worked." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46299504)) "hard to beat for developer ergonomics and long-term maintenance" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47140874)) "I enjoy working with modern C# way more than node.js" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45898530))
- Strong web and enterprise ecosystem (5 comments): "Microsoft cross platform effort always pushed forward Web development and distributed systems, hardly "that's about it"." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47135028)) "Yeah, also the ecosystem, aspire, ef core, Orleans, ML.NET etc..at this point I don't know what's really missing." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45839500)) "In the enterprise world, dotnet with c# is one of the best choices" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47135755))
- Fast, competitive runtime performance (4 comments): "C# tooling for HTTP and gRPC web services is really, really good and very competitive performance wise." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49869543)) "a well developed modern C#/dotnet application is plenty fast for most use cases" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48676450)) "The dotnet garbage collector does more than a good enough job for a weather app" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49648934))
- Open source and cross-platform (5 comments): "a language being backed by big tech is a plus as long as the stack is fully open-source (which .net now is)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46447694)) "We have a tremendous supply of open source libraries in NuGet, just like every other language" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45901284)) "I highly recommend trying C# on Linux, it works fantastic." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46526614))

## What people warn about

- Distrust of Microsoft's openness (2 comments): "Microsoft don't want to open source .NET Core debugger." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48843861)) "Ms is hostile towards its developers" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49712833))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Rust](https://hackerapproved.com/p/rust.md): 2039 recommend
- [Go](https://hackerapproved.com/p/go-programming-language.md): 1254 recommend
- [Python](https://hackerapproved.com/p/python.md): 1067 recommend
- [Zig](https://hackerapproved.com/p/zig.md): 743 recommend
- [TypeScript](https://hackerapproved.com/p/typescript.md): 574 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "C# and .NET", https://hackerapproved.com/p/c-sharp-and-net/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).