I spent some time learning dotnet core this year and with the slow-grind progress Microsoft has made it really does look like the technology stack might start to replace Java, Go, Rails, NodeJS, over the next decade. You can really feel Microsoft's experience in language development and enterprise software development coming together to provide better ecosystem ergonomics than other frameworks and toolchains.

Specifically I'm talking about tools like LINQ, dotnet core libraries, VS and VS Code integration, and the standard library and common library packages.

I still think it has a long way to go but its still a huge potential upside, which is to say nothing of how its coming to dominate the games industry as well.

I spent 10 years doing C# on a big system and love it. However it never got the momentum Java did so I've switched. I prefer C# over Java, I hate a lot of Spring attribute/factory/builder craziness, but Java has so much more wider support I would always choose it first now.

Same here. The Java ecosystem has almost everything you could ever imagine needing so it’s a safer bet. Maybe it’s not as shiny but it works. I don’t understand why MS doesn’t provide the ability to call Java code from .NET. It would open up a lot of libraries to the platform. Right now there are a lot of libraries that are first class in Java but have either no or only half baked .NET ports.

Which libraries? Could you give some examples?

- Akka https://github.com/akka/akka - Lucene https://github.com/apache/lucene-solr - Aeron https://github.com/real-logic/aeron - Retrofit https://github.com/square/retrofit

Not to mention projects like Apache Spark, Cassandra, Elasticsearch, Druid - Java projects. Many projects (Foundation DB, Scylla DB, I could find more) will have in-house support for Java and not .NET.

The .NET equivalents to these libraries tend to be playing catch up. Xamarin Android will always be playing catch-up to Android's Java/Kotlin APIs for Android. Big machine learning projects like PyTorch and TensorFlow tend to give first-class support of some fashion to a Java API (mostly due to Android). Is there a .NET equivalent to Deeplearning4j? Hadoop? Hive? Kakfa?

In Java there is a proliferation of web projects: Spring, Vert.x, Quarkus, Micronaut, Play 2, Spark Java; Netty, Jetty, Apache. In .NET all you ever hear about is Microsoft projects ASP.NET core; Kestrel, IIS.

Working as a .NET dev, when there is an SDK, if it's not from Microsoft, it's clear the .NET SDK is a lower priority for bug fixes and new features compared to e.g. the Java/Python/etc.