C# and .NET
Hacker ApprovedRanked 47 of 163 programming languages by recommenders
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.
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.
46 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 42
- criticize it
- 4
- approval share
- 91%
Recommended in 10 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: not recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Owned for 5 years
Median of the 3 owners who said how long they have had it.
Each square is one year.
Why it carries the badge
- 42 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 11 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 10 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Productive and pleasant to use
“was a breath of fresh air after TS. Each iteration just worked.”
Comment from 17 Dec 2025 in “Show HN: Titan – JavaScript-first framework that compiles into a Rust server” “hard to beat for developer ergonomics and long-term maintenance”
Comment from 24 Feb 2026 in “Would you choose the Microsoft stack today if starting greenfield?” “I enjoy working with modern C# way more than node.js”
Comment from 12 Nov 2025 in “.NET 10” - Comment from 12 May 2026 in “If AI Writes Your Code, Why Use Python?”
- Comment from 1 Jun 2026 in “Tracing HTTP Requests with Go's net/HTTP/httptrace”
- Comment from 10 Apr 2026 in “Explore union types in C# 15”
Strong web and enterprise ecosystem
“Microsoft cross platform effort always pushed forward Web development and distributed systems, hardly "that's about it".”
Comment from 24 Feb 2026 in “Ladybird Browser adopts Rust” “Yeah, also the ecosystem, aspire, ef core, Orleans, ML.NET etc..at this point I don't know what's really missing.”
Comment from 6 Nov 2025 in “Swift on FreeBSD Preview” “In the enterprise world, dotnet with c# is one of the best choices”
Comment from 24 Feb 2026 in “Would you choose the Microsoft stack today if starting greenfield?” - Comment from 23 May 2026 in “dotNET (OK, C#) gets union types”
- Comment from 19 Feb 2026 in “Ladybird: Closing this as we are no longer pursuing Swift adoption”
Fast, competitive runtime performance
“C# tooling for HTTP and gRPC web services is really, really good and very competitive performance wise.”
Comment from 27 Sep 2026 in “Rust for C# and .NET developers guide by Microsoft” “a well developed modern C#/dotnet application is plenty fast for most use cases”
Comment from 25 Jun 2026 in “Apple increases MacBook and iPad prices by 20%” “The dotnet garbage collector does more than a good enough job for a weather app”
Comment from 10 Sep 2026 in “Rust is tier-1 language at Microsoft” - Comment from 1 Feb 2026 in “Data Processing Benchmark Featuring Rust, Go, Swift, Zig, Julia etc.”
Open source and cross-platform
“a language being backed by big tech is a plus as long as the stack is fully open-source (which .net now is)”
Comment from 31 Dec 2025 in “Stardew Valley developer made a $125k donation to the FOSS C# framework MonoGame” “We have a tremendous supply of open source libraries in NuGet, just like every other language”
Comment from 12 Nov 2025 in “.NET 10” “I highly recommend trying C# on Linux, it works fantastic.”
Comment from 7 Jan 2026 in “Show HN: TCP chat server written in C# and .NET 9, used in the terminal” - Comment from 28 Jan 2026 in “Apple to Soon Take Up to 30% Cut from All Patreon Creators in iOS App”
- Comment from 13 Nov 2025 in “.NET 10”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Distrust of Microsoft's openness
“Microsoft don't want to open source .NET Core debugger.”
Comment from 9 Jul 2026 in “Rewriting Bun in Rust” “Ms is hostile towards its developers”
Comment from 15 Sep 2026 in “Java 27”
Other programming languages people recommend
The four most recommended other programming languages, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
See all 163 programming languages, rankedWhat people said
40 of the 51 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“At a certain scale/complexity you need to graduate to using C# and .NET.”
“the training data is full of .NET code; there's a well defined set of ways of working & best practices with .NET”
“C# tooling for HTTP and gRPC web services is really, really good and very competitive performance wise.”
“C#/.NET and WinForms is still a viable choice”
“Ms is hostile towards its developers”
“The dotnet garbage collector does more than a good enough job for a weather app”
“Microsoft don't want to open source .NET Core debugger.”
“a well developed modern C#/dotnet application is plenty fast for most use cases”
“It was pleasant and productive to use.”
“the only other ecosystem that looks at development the same way”
“If those are issues, I rather use C#/.NET than expose both developers and AI agents to a cognitive overload.”
“C# will keep being very strong in enterprise too.”
“It's a very decent language (I mean C#) and runtime”
“it's been a great experience all around”
“c# has a lot of these advantages and is a lot easier to write”
“I've heard others had similar results with .NET/C#”
“C#/.NET is the best you can get today.”
“It was a big differentiator in one of our analysis.”
“C#/.NET is widely available nowadays and in many respects less held back”
“hard to beat for developer ergonomics and long-term maintenance”
“In the enterprise world, dotnet with c# is one of the best choices”
“Microsoft cross platform effort always pushed forward Web development and distributed systems, hardly "that's about it".”
“For new backend work it's C#/.NET all the way.”
“it's still challenging to do anything that requires calling into the OS, because you're going to need the bindings”
“That is the no longer the case in C# 14/.NET 10”
“I still love C#/.NET. I use it everyday, but my god, has Swift been a breath of fresh air.”
“modern .NET is very fast and is getting faster still”
“I have nearly a decade of experience building .NET C# solutions on Linux”
“.NET is even truly cross-platform now, and open-source.”
“I highly recommend trying C# on Linux, it works fantastic.”
“a language being backed by big tech is a plus as long as the stack is fully open-source (which .net now is)”
“slow (very slow) development speed on basic language features”
“was a breath of fresh air after TS. Each iteration just worked.”
“all our library dependencies have been open-source”
“I regret that decision and won't be using it again for any new projects.”
“have spent a lot of time/effort trying to dispel some of these myths and mis-understandings through writing”
“We have a tremendous supply of open source libraries in NuGet, just like every other language”
“I enjoy working with modern C# way more than node.js”
“Yeah, also the ecosystem, aspire, ef core, Orleans, ML.NET etc..at this point I don't know what's really missing.”
“Both C# and .net are busy releasing a lot of features.”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.