Some examples:
- Attributes can do a lot of magic that is not always obvious or well documented.
- ASP.NET pipeline.
- Source generators.
I love C#, but I have to admit we could have done with less “magic” in cases like these.
Some examples:
- Attributes can do a lot of magic that is not always obvious or well documented.
- ASP.NET pipeline.
- Source generators.
I love C#, but I have to admit we could have done with less “magic” in cases like these.
Attributes do nothing at all on their own. It's someone else's code that does magic by reflecting on your types and looking for those attributes. That may seem like a trivial distinction, but there's a big difference between "the language is doing magic" and "some poorly documented library I'm using is doing magic". I rarely use and generally dislike attributes. I sometimes wonder if C# would be better off without them, but there are some legitimate usages like interop with unmanaged code that would be really awkward any other way. They are OK if you think of them as a weakly enforced part of the type system, and relegate their use to when a C# code object is representing something external like an API endpoint or an unmanaged call. Even this is often over-done.
Yes, the ASP.NET pipeline is a bit of a mess. My strategy is to plug in a couple adapters that allow me to otherwise avoid it. I rolled my own DI framework, for instance.
Source generators are present in all languages and terrible in all languages, so that certainly is not a criticism of C#. It would be a valid criticism if a language required you to use source generators to work efficiently (e.g. limited languages like VB6/VBA). But I haven't used source generators in C# in at least 10 years, and I honestly don't know why anyone would at this point.
Maybe it sounds like I'm dodging by saying C# is great even though the big official frameworks Microsoft pushes (not to mention many of their tutorials) are kinda bad. I'd be more amenable to that argument if it took more than an afternoon to plug in the few adapters you need to escape their bonds and just do it all your own way with the full joy of pure, clean C#. You can write bad code in any language.
That's not to say there's nothing wrong with C#. There are some features I'd still like to see added (e.g. co-/contra-variance on classes & structs), some that will never be added but I miss sometimes (e.g. higher-kinded types), and some that are wonderful but lagging behind (e.g. Expressions supporting newer language features).
A common way to work around this is to provide a `IsSet` boolean:
Now you can check if the value is set.However, you can see how tedious this can get without a source Generator. With a source generator, we simply take nullable partial properties and generate the stub automatically.
Now a single marker attribute will generate as many `Is*Set` properties as needed.Of course, the other use case is for AOT to avoid reflection by generating the source at runtime.
> But I haven't used source generators in C# in at least 10 years
Source generators didn't exist in C# 10 years ago. You probably had something else in mind?
I don't really consider any of these magic, particularly source generators.
It's just code that generates code. Some of the syntax is awkward, but it's not magic imo.