Yes I think it's a bit underrated. The problem I find is that no one writes C# libraries that actually do anything (e.g. even basic linear algebra is pretty crap compared to python) and that the JIT is a pointless hindrance but the experience of using the stack is pretty good.
I agree completely regarding libraries, C# has never had the "libraries for everything", especially open source ones. The better libraries have moved to ( or always have been ) licensed too which doesn't help that impression.
I'd like to hear more about your issue with the JIT and where do you find it a hindrance?
I've had a few benchmarks lately that performed better under JIT than AOT compilation, and while that isn't always the case, the JIT, especially on dotnet 10, performs very well.
No, but when used in application areas where languages like C++ are the obvious alternatives, it has always had very good integration with native code and platform technologies, and in recent history both C# and the .NET ecosystem have been very focused on performance and platform support.
Put another way, "100% pure .NET" was never a goal in the same way it was in the Java world, but I never saw this as holding it back any more than the reliance on native code holds back languages like Python, because both have very good integration stories.
My only complaint is the lack of cross-platform support for C++/CLI, as it was a very useful tool for integrating with libraries that lack a non-C++ API.
The JIT adds basically nothing to the language other than complexity and also forces a boundary between dotnet and it's peers that I think hobbles it via harder interop.
The performance in theory can be slightly better in some niches but my point is simply that it's a huge chunk of complexity for not much gain.
> The problem I find is that no one writes C# libraries that actually do anything
Yes, because when you think about it, why should they?
MS has showed many times how unreliable and even user-hostile they can be, so the community at large is very wary of their ecosystem in spite of real advancements.
C# indeed does not have a catch-all ecosystem. But for some domains (servers, UI are a mess but also pretty good, CLI is plausible), it has a very good support. Like Java but nicer (this is subjective) and faster (this is not).
> even basic linear algebra is pretty crap compared to python
I wouldn't qualify that with "even". Numerical stuff like that is one of Python's most well-developed niches, and Python's numerical ecosystem is the benchmark everything else needs to be compared against.
I mean, I lead an initiative to move numerically heavy microservices from c# to numerical python in my previous job (that was initially a windows shop but absorbed a linux based r&d company) because c# was so limiting. But details on that don't really fit into a HN comment.
My own version of this is that I was actually quite pleasantly surprised using k8s for the first time, expecting it to be much more complicated, but then pretty shocked at how complicated the ecosystem around it is.
Unless nuclear gets dramatically cheaper one should expect to see basically just the minimum amount of it to maintain grid stability / heavy industry, or something in that direction (I think). Obviously this is quite path dependant.
The one thing I really wish people would take away from thinking about energy / grid composition and so on is that its a portfolio construction problem.
If you ever, ever, see anyone banging on about how expensive or cheap a particularly type of generation is please just write them off as either an idiot or a liar - what matters is the cost of constructing a portfolio of electricity production that meets the requirements of a nation e.g. running an industrial economy solely off solar power is probably impossible but it seems realistic to imagine a "modern" (politics aside) economy that runs off sending emails on a mixture of solar power and storage.
Renewables often make more sense for robust decentralized infrastructure.
However, the upfront cost of Full-sized Fission power facilities are often still around 1/2 to 1/3 the end user $/kWh. The issues arise with the long term waste stewardship costs, and the cognitive disconnect people can engineer their way out of the liabilities.
Now that "AI" data-centers are acting like a public infrastructure equity siphon, in some places private solar can have a payback period measured in under a few years. =3
In my country we have people, lots of them, that would prefer to forget that renewables forget and to massively build out nuclear to meet demand. In that situation it makes sense to bang the energy cost drum. Yes, obviously the network needs to be kept running and that may take some added nuclear and investment in the existing hydro plants, but at the end of the day a sizeable part will going to be renewables as it is so much cheaper.
Centralized energy infrastructure tends to be a military target. Russia targeted Ukraine's nuke plants right off the bat. The US appears to be losing to Iran one strait, pipeline, refinery, or tanker at a time. The neat thing about solar is that it's not cost effective to shoot at--you're gonna spend more on the drone than your enemy is gonna spend replacing that panel. All of the things nuclear has going for it also make it a juicy target, and I'd rather pick up pieces of bombed panels than pieces of bombed reactors.
So if you get tired of banging the energy cost drum, consider a fill or two on the adversarial resilience drum.
Or if you prefer, consider resilience in the face of a heat wave. The fear that maybe the power will go out mid-disaster... it's just not actionable. That changes with a distributed system: you can channel it into making sure your house's or your neighborhood's battery is up to the task.
Your enemy doesn’t need to bomb the solar panels from a solar plant, they can just target the grid connection instead.
Unless you make rooftop solar + batteries with variable rate accessible for everyone (like Australia is said to have done), then yeah there will be no easy target.
But even then, your enemy could still target your grid stabilization infrastructure/peaker plants and make those who were not able to afford batteries lose power.
I wish grid operators could have some sort of remote control/feedback of “smart residential inverters” to be able to stabilize the last mile of the grid independently, maybe through a lora mesh or whatever their meters use.
Right, bombs are for when every $1 you spend on the bomb costs your opponent $1000.
If you're targeting many many instances of cheap decentralized infrastructure that doesn't take the whole region down when hit, it merely degrades slightly, then you're looking at something like $1:$1.
At efficiencies like that you might as well give up and resort to diplomacy.
What? Nuclear is cheap to build when the rules hold still. The problem is that while a plant is being under construction (which can be fast), policies change and on a multi-year build, every change means rework and financing costs on capital that is sitting idle. That's the main driver of prices, along with restrictions that keep tightening, the most overbearing being the linear no-threshold model. It's not a problem inherent to nuclear build out. Gas is faster and more modular because it is less encumbered and because we have far more experience building it. If gas/carbon construction was as hampered as nuclear is, the costs would be equivalent. They are not, because coal and gas have the backing of powerful interests that would not let that kind of policy instability happen. Meanwhile, nuclear has no backer with the same amount of resources
This oft quoted idea that nukes are only expensive because of incompetent regulations, and if they just got out of poor nuclear a way it would be affordable, doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.
There are a lot of different regulatory regimes all over the world and nukes are expensive in all of them. The only way to make them cheapish is if the state builds , secures and insures them (eg china) , but that’s just hiding the costs in govt subsidies . And even then chinas % share of nukes continues to decline because they cost more than anything else.
I'm seeing a lot of totally unevidenced slop that [guy I dislike]'s support has collapsed after Ukraine blew up a datacentre.
In general most accusations are confessions, pay attention to people who use words like disinformation and misinformation. They want to control other people's speech.
Maybe. Volatility I think, ceteris paribus, forces the clearing price up and wind is extremely volatile so there is only so much you can get with having more of it.
We have expensive, potentially unreliable (if an interconnect fails we are completely fucked so certainly fragile), energy.
Energy is what allows modernity to function, we have made it so expensive that no one can make anything in Britain just in time for hard power and manufacturing to be really important again.
Chemicals, metals, pottery, glass,fertiliser etc are all basically impossible to do competitively in Britain.
Energy has only been expensive recently, and there has been zero issue with power supply beyond silly tabloid fear mongering. So between the 70s and lets say 10 years ago, the argument for expensive power really does not hold true.
Which industries? If you're going to make that claim be specific. The UK has deindustrialised since the 70s which was nothing to do with electricity costs or availability. Any recent industries leaving are not covered by the stats here so would be pretty irrelevant, which means you're not talking about those, you're talking about something else for it to cover the period between the 70s and now.
4,000 people lost their livelihoods in Hull last month with the owner explicitly citing electricity costs as the reason. More or less every single steel producer, and even refineries, are just gone.
Yeah this doesn't answer the question does it. It's not even what this topic is about. Closing something a couple of months ago isnt moving the needle on the post literally talking about since the 1970s, which is the point I was very clear about making to hopefully avoid someones "well last month X happened" argument which as you full well know is nothing remotely to do with the topic at hand, however sad it may be that people have lost their jobs, which is also not the topic at hand.
There are so many great companies that were in existence in Britain that were as good as any company in the world. And most of them have folded up like a cheap suit. Note: the Brits aren’t alone. The thing that hurts is that Great Britain had access to the North Sea oil and basically squandered it. Their partner/peer across the North Sea, Norway, had a plan and they executed very well to the derision of many economic purists/conservatives even today because they didn’t give the gentry class the share they wanted.
There are many companies that have folded or who are in reduced circumstances in the United States. Many of them were dominant after the war. And they were on top of their game, but despite being on the top, the management team wanted to set themselves up and just wanted to milk the proceeds and primarily stick them into their pockets.
US Steel, Xerox, Kodak, IBM, Intel Microsoft, Motorola Schaumburg, Illinois let’s be honest, most of these companies stagnated at the top, in many areas of modern technology, being on top isn’t the end it’s just the start. of an endless process on a treadmill for as long as you are in existence, as a company. Which is the main reason why Apple had better take the design and engineering of memory in house the treadmill never stops.
Balancing auctions are pay-as-bid, the alternative is lights-off.
Capacity auctions are iirc pay as clear. Maybe day ahead as well.
One thing to consider as well is that without some external stimulus scheme all of the fossil/nuclear (even ignoring CFD schemes) would immediately go bust IIRC if the market was solely pay-as-bid because wind and solar are cheap but extremely spotty so the price would either be 0 or 1000, probably not the latter long enough to keep the gas plants we currently rely on in business => no more power on cold calm nights.
Well whatever the hell they're doing on pricing it's not working. Having huge amounts of wind, strong interconnects, gas fields near by and still ending up tied for 3rd most expensive elec is ridiculous. Especially given how good storage is looking relative to gas lately [0].
The main things that will reduce our power bills is a) upgrading the grid to improve transmission and reduce curtailment; and b) adding generation and storage capacity, reducing the amount of high-cost peak gas generation we use.
These things are in progress. A vast amount of generation and storage capacity came online this year and much more still to come. This will gradually take effect, oil conflicts notwithstanding.
We may genuinely have the worst energy market in the developed world. It's going to get cheaper and reliable any day soon - George monbiot told me so it must be true.
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