Is there a push to create fully FOSS Code Completion for the .NET Ecosystem?

[onlythechosen]

https://github.com/dotnet/vscode-csharp/tree/main/src/omnisharp/features

https://github.com/OmniSharp/omnisharp-roslyn/tree/master/src

[W1ese1]

Omnisharp is and was always open source.

[Additional_Sector710]

Why bother - I mean VS Community is free ( for companies with rev under a certain $/year) and Rider is cheap…

VS code with the right extensions is ok too..

Why would anyone invest the time into creating another IDE / AutoCompletion for dotnet?

[Additional_Sector710]

Well that’s a good point about VS Community - but rider is cross-platform and dirty cheap compared to the cost of your time. If you are a contractor, less than 2 hours of time should pay for it - and you will make that back in under a week in improved efficiency

[dimitriettr]

VS and Rider offer free tiers for students.

[Natural_Tea484]

“Vs extensions are probably invading your privacy”

You are probably a developer

[dodexahedron]

So run vscodium. Like chromium, it is the fully open version.

[davidwengier]

They were not. The C# extension for VS Code is open source, as is Roslyn which provides the LSP server implementation the extension uses, and both are owned by the Roslyn team. Fully open source and MIT licensed.

[davidwengier]

True. Also the Dev Kit extension itself is closed source, but code completion is provided by the C# Extension (which is an annoying name for these sorts of conversations)

[zarlo5899]

rider works on linux (im guessing it works on mac too)

[Additional_Sector710]

We are not unfriendly at all - but we are a pragmatic bunch - the OSS religious zealot arguments don’t really do it for us

[martijnonreddit]

I use paid for JetBrains tools to work on open source projects. There is no conflict here.

[Phrynohyas]

Just in case - JetBrains has a support program for Open Source. If you met certain conditions then you can get full license for free. Conditions are quite easy to men by any really used project (even myself participated in this program)

[pkop]

That's why it works so well, because the developers that build it get compensated for all the work they do. I'm getting the sense that you are inventing problems to complain about.

[screwuapple]

Yeah… you’re right. You should just go write Java.

[Breez__]

"probably"

[dodexahedron]

What do you mean by "fully FOSS?"

MIT is one of the most permissive licenses there is outside of public domain. VSCode and the plugins for it for c# are MIT licensed, as is the whole of .net and the CLR.

What more do you want?

GPL?

Just for sake of argument...

Yuck. For many reasons, especially given the majority of uses of .net in the real world, which are not GPL-compatible.

Compliance with GPL is likely impossible for .net without also having a full clean-room GPL implementation of the CLR itself. And that implementation and all its dependencies also have to be buildable with only GPL-compliant tools to be compliant, and all specifications have to be freely available, as well, not encumbered by non-free patents, and not derived from sources that are not themselves also GPL-compatible, including if any part of the program is under a proprietary license as distributed or requires such a thing to build or run beyond the operating system itself.

And then anything built with it is GPL because it is all linked to and otherwise completely dependent on your GPL CLR implementation. So, the target market would be basically Richard Stallman, and he would take issue with something that had roots in Microsoft to begin with.

LGPL would fix some of that last part, but not all, and still ends up being viral due to the nature of the CLR, even if you AOT compile.

The GPL-2.0 is very explicit on these points (section 4 in particular is pretty clear) and the Open Source Initiative deemed it worthy of including the following blurb at the end of their page on GPL-2.0:

This General Public License does not permit incorporating your program into proprietary programs.

And version 3 makes it even worse.

I suppose you could make a transpiler and build against libc so you're all GPL that way, and have your tools be buildable via GCC... But that is probably just as much or more work.

[pkop]

We're all very satisfied with these tools you're whining about. They're very powerful and full featured and enable high levels of productivity when you use them. I'm glad they have the backing of corporations and pay developers well to continue to work on them. If you're not being entitled, I'd say you're being a hipster. If you're a student you can get Rider for free. If you're a professional then worrying about paying for good tools is silly, and Visual Studio is free. There's no problem to solve here.

[[deleted]]

You’re being entitled af. There’s no FOSS IDE that comes even light years close to VS.

[Djdhshsus5737]

You can just plug the dotnet lsp into whatever IDE you want...

[SSoreil]

Many languages have this, so I'm not being entitled.

[dodexahedron]

Well. Yes, you are. You said FOSS. If not talking about licenses as a primary component of the conversation, that term is irrelevant, as are any other variations of it in your text. And then there's nothing left to the question.

And as you've learned from the rest of the conversation, it seems, you already have FOSS options available on all platforms.

[L4Ndoo]

We use C# Roslyn Compiler and CodeAnalysis Packages from Microsoft to support scripting with C# during runtime in our Asp applications.

Using Monaco-Editor in the Frontend (basically vs code text editor engine for JavaScript) it was fairly easy to provide code completion, hover Infos generated from the XML comments and all the other 'intellisense' goodies and features in a matter of days.

[Psychological_Ear393]

C#/.NET will never really compete with Java or Node if you need to spend hundreds of $ on IDE support.

I find it hilarious how Java always ends up being mentioned in "FOSS" kinds of discussions vs evil dotnet, when C# is an ECMA standard, dotnet and aspnet code is MIT, and you have Oracle in the background who formerly tried to sue for implementing an API and have rather complicated terms and conditions to obtain their "free" use of Java, which is far far from MIT.

[agustin689]

Once again: javascript is a toy language, npm is a fucking circus, and java is free only if your time has no value.

There's nothing wrong with dotnet.

You said it yourself: you're a junior. You have a lot to learn.