- My notes as a newcomer to the C# language and the .NET platform. At this moment, I don't know anything about language except for the most rudimentary syntax. I am kinda shocked by how the capitalization of methods in C# and I am sure it will take me forever to get used to this.
- As far as the language goes, I will focus on how it differs from Java.
- I will break these notes into the following sections:
- C# is an object-oriented language. It supports all the good old features of Java's objects.
- One aspect where C# kinda beats Java is the unified type system. Everything is an object in C# whether it be a primitive like an integer or a custom type. You don't need to wrap the
inttype as you'd do in Java. - C#, too, has support for functional programming in the form of lambdas and immutable types.
- C# is statically type, meaning it enforces type safety at compile time. It also enforces type safety in runtime.
- C# is strongly typed! You can't just add a float to a integer unless you explicitly do some form of casting.
- C# can also be a dynamic language just like Python, hhmmm!!?
- The Common Language Runtime provides automatic memory management. A garbage collector takes care of and freeing memory. You can use pointers, although you might never use them and using them is restricted.
- CLR? is that the equivalent of JVM?!
- .NET consists of the CLR and a bunch of libraries that include core libraries and other applied libraries, whatever that means.
- C# is a managed language that gets compiled into managed code which gets executed by the CLR. The code executed by the CLR is in the form of either an executable file (.exe) or a library (.ddl).
- The CLR converts the intermediate language (which I think is equivalent to bytecode) into native machine code though aJIT (just in time compilation) mechanism.
- With .NET Native, you can compile code directly into native code.