What is .NET, and why should you choose it?
.NET languages are amazing. It&#x27;s fairly easy to program in <i>any</i> style in C# now: imperative, or OO with massive inheritance hierarchies, or even functional-only with LINQ and things like switch expressions and primary constructors (mentioned in the article). C# now also has top-level statements, so no need for `public class Main { public static void main() {}}`.<p>The .NET standard library is by far the biggest I&#x27;ve ever seen—it&#x27;s not merely &#x27;batteries included&#x27;; it&#x27;s &#x27;everything under the Sun included&#x27;. NET also comes with a straightforward package manager for third party libraries (NuGet).<p>There are a variety of development environments available—VS2022, VS Code, Rider, command-line tools. Speaking of command-line tools, the `dotnet` bootstrapper makes it really easy to get started with any sort of project.<p>The compiler and static analysis tool set, Roslyn, is itself increasingly written in C#, having migrated from C++. With NET 7, code can now be compiled to native binaries ahead-of-time, and there&#x27;s even an experimental LLVM backend[1].<p>One can write code for almost <i>any</i> use case (except perhaps embedded) with .NET. It really needs to be used more.<p>And needless to say: .NET is open-source and cross-platform.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dotnet&#x2F;runtimelab&#x2F;tree&#x2F;feature&#x2F;NativeAOT-LLVM">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dotnet&#x2F;runtimelab&#x2F;tree&#x2F;feature&#x2F;NativeAOT-...</a>