this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2024
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C# is such a crappy language.
You can't even do a=b if they are classes, and you're forced down the chosen road all the time. It's like java all over.
Sure you can, it’s the same in C# as it would be in C++ if you did a=b, where a and b are both pointers.
You don’t want to copy the full data of a class around every time you use it, that would have extremely poor performance. If you do want that behaviour, use structs instead of classes. If you need to clone a class for whatever reason, you can do that too, but it’s not really something that you should need to do all that often.
I don’t think you should really jump in and call something crappy if you just don’t really know how to use it, personally!
In C++ you have the choice, the compiler makes the shallow copy (you know what that is right?) automatically if needed, or you can move around the pointer or a ref. Or, transform the shallow copy into a deep copy if you need that.
In c# you don't even not have the choice, ints etc gets copied but classes aren't. Where's the logic behind that?
And as so many others you scramble to find some excuse that "you should probably not do that very often anyways" or some other bullshit.
I heard all that 20 years ago when it actually had some merit for people trying to run it on the old crappy hardware of the day, today it's just moot.
Need speed or low memory usage? Learn to code in C/C++ for example. Heard Rust is great too.
C# is just an old wonky language.
/Rant off
Just for context, I’m an experienced software engineer with years of experience with both C++ and C#, as well as several others, including Rust. You can do shallow and deep copies in C# as well, it’s done extremely infrequently because it’s usually a bit of a code smell and it has some downsides - it’s inefficient both for performance and for memory.
In C# the assignment operator will copy the value if it’s a value type (structs and primitives) and copy the reference if it’s a reference type (classes). It does that because it’s a garbage collected language and it needs to track how memory is referenced and so on.
The whole debate about what languages are better is honestly a bit silly, IMO. C, C++, Python, C#, Javascript, Rust, they all serve their purpose, they have their strengths and weaknesses.
Now you are doing it again, you just say generic sensible stuff strawman way.
Like yeah I know about "the assignment operator" and it's still shitty you can't decide what it's copying. You explaining how it works doesn't make it better lol!
You are also blatantly wrong, there is absolutely no reason to not let you copy a class or pass an int as a ref "because of the garbage collector", if you want to make a language having these functionalities there is nothing preventing it to be done correctly.
Also c# is an inefficient language to begin with, not letting the user do as he pleases is just dumbing things down, nothing to do with efficiency.
Also, we all have tons of experience (5 years xp isn't experienced btw) no need to go get your diploma :-)
And another straw man, when did I say that a language is better than another? Never did I do that, but I guess you are not happy with all your arguments geting shot down.
C# is a crap language, if you are forced to use it like at work, or if you don't want to learn another one, use it!
But you can't polish a turd.
Sorry I insulted your favourite programming language lol.
The truth hurts the most.
"deleted" lmao what did the comment say? OP deleted it after all it seems.
And what would that equality entail? Reference equality? You have
.Equalsfor that for every single class. Structural equality? You can write an operator for that (but yeah, there's no structural equality out of the box for classes, that I have to concede).Hell, in newer C# (~3-4 versions back, I don't recall off the top of my head) you have records, which actually do support that out of the box, with a lot more concise syntax to boot.
As fir that being Java all over again: it started off as a Java clone, and later on moved in its own direction. It has similar-ish syntax, but that's the extent of it.
It's a single =
a = 5;
b = c;
And hell, "use .Equal" is exactly what it is all about, have you heard of == ?
Back in the day all the big languages were hard to learn and had lots of quirks, but somehow C/C++ moved on and became quite simple and elegant (you can write the worst trash with it ofc. but that's like saying you shouldn't cook because you might burn your chicken). C# not so much.
.Equalsand==have different meaning in C#. Decent IDEs will warn you about that (and yes, that excludes Visual Studio, but that always was crap 😄).I admit, "canonical C#" looks like shit due to a fuckton of legacy stuff. Fortunately, newer patterns solve that rather neatly and that started way back in C# 6 or 7 (with arrow functions / props and inlined
outs).Tl;dr: check the new features, fiddle with the language yourself. Because hell, with
ref structs you can make it behave like quasi-Rust