In the past 5–7 years, the direction of .NET community is suggested by a few .NET community leads in China (I don’t wanna mention their name because it’s not important).
According to my observation, the directions/points from these community lead are here:
- .NET is also safe and controllable (safe and controllable is a concept introduced by China government). .NET can compete with Java and Go in China
- Encourage .NET to participant in digitalization innovation（信创） projects and safe and controllable projects（安可工程）
- Actively encourage Loognson CPU (a China-made CPU) support in .NET
- Cloud Native is the future of .NET
I believe this was how disaster began because all these direction are wrong. These mistakes directly caused the urgent shrink of .NET market in China in the past 5 years. It’s a pity that .NET has became a minority programming language in China.
This post will explain what happened with the following topics:
- Why China-made Loongson CPU is not worth the support from .NET community
- Why .NET should not actively participant in digitalization innovation projects?
- Why cloud native is not the future of .NET
Why China-made Loognson CPU is not worth the support from .NET community
Since Loongson Technology Co is a publicly traded company, all the finance report is public. Let’s take a look at its 2022 finance report.
Summary:
In 2022, Loongson Zhongke achieved operating income of 739 million yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 38.51%; net profit of 51.752 million yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 78.15%; basic earnings per share was 0.14 yuan.
Moreover, Loongson Technology Co received 131 million RMB in state subsidies per year. If the government subsidies drop significantly in the next few years, the profits will be negative. If Loongson cannot reduce costs in the next few years, it will definitely kill itself.
In this context, I don’t understand why Loongson, which is unable to protect itself, can lead .NET out of the quagmire.
Why .NET should not actively participant in digitalization innovation projects?
I have also heard that some people in the community think that digitalization innovation projects are the big cakes, and we should find ways to incorporate .NET technology into them.
But contrary to expectations, I learned from a few official and unofficial channels that .NET has been basically characterized as an unsafe and controllable programming language. (of course this is not a technical judgment, but more a political factor).
In this case, it’s almost impossible for the .NET community to change anything. You have to convince the government, unless you have a strong government background, otherwise it is just nonsense. I have to admit this kind of cultural revolution 2.0. No one is making technical judges in scentific way.
Why Cloud Native is not the future of .NET
The cloud native market is very mature, and with the CNCF Foundation taking over there, it is almost impossible for .NET to get a share of the pie. Moreover, CNCF almost only accepts Golang projects. Even Microsoft-owned cloud native project Dapr eventually chose Golang instead of .NET to implement it, which is very realistic.
The early slogan of .NET has always been that .NET can do everything, but in fact this slogan lacks strategy. Any programming language has its shortcomings. Rather than touching everything, it is better to focus on specific fields and industries. For example, .NET tried to enter the field of big data and mobile development in the past few years, but ended in failure. In this case, we have to admit that we should not touch areas that are completely impossible for .NET to enter.
