Why

[ghuntley]

overview

The why is rapidly developing as a result of informed discussions with people in the community and Microsoft employees. Please come join the discord channel (#48). A formal blog post and mission statement is to come but to in the spirit of starting discussions here are some napkin thoughts...

1. Ownership. Fundamentally reshapes how the community thinks about their programming languages, stewardship and ownership. Right now people bitch at Microsoft. Microsoft has transformed dramatically (not enough) but the way the community thinks has not.

2. Trust. Microsoft has squandered such amazing goodwill. The original PR was "inadvertently" rushed and locked before anyone could comment on it. Deleting the entire source tree isn't something you accidentally do! Hot Reload is back, but these events doesn't instill confidence in that it won't happen again. From the outside the it appears as if Scott Hunter had to step in to be the fall guy for someone else's decision which involved removing GA+LTS features from the SDK that had Go Live approval.

3. Unity. Reunify key .NET tooling Unify the .NET platform debugger story #13 and improve tooling Rust/Golang has a better 1st class experience in VSCode than C# #20

4. Growth. Introduces .NET to a demographic of developers who avoid .NET because Microsoft. If .NET wasn't associated specifically and only with Microsoft it may have wider adoption.

5. Innovation. Remove friction for community to conduct experiments (such as Driving a .NET build with something other than MSBuild #23 and Instantly make and keep fixes to .NET dependencies from an IDE (everything, including the runtime itself) #25) without approval of Microsoft and try out ideas without restraint from other programming language ecosystems.

6. Personal Development. Build a community of toolchain wonks and engage engineers from Microsoft in the old school CH9 format from time-to-time for mentoring: “hey, The community wants to build dotnet from source. Can you walk us through the codebase and explain what the community needs to know?”

7. A gift to the next person or company that comes along. Removing all friction for those that come after us.

discussions

Collective ownership and the ability to change / improve anything in the .NET tooling and developer experience ala to Own Your Own Future when it comes to your toolchain is a central northstar. - ani

wat it do - ani

What's the purpose of forking the dotnet repositories? Is it to create a fork of the ecosystem, or to push back into the mainline repos? There's no issue with Microsoft not accepting contributions when they're offered, so I don't understand how forking will help? - Yair Halberstadt

Love the premise and energy though. The effort feels analogous to bootstrapping an OpenJDK for .NET. Very exciting 🙂 - Mpdreamz

I'd like to understand the reasoning for forking everything myself. I've seen various complaints, particularly around the debugger. But that doesn't to me explain why the world needs to be forked rather than just driving projects around the relevant "missing" bits, as it were. [For example] It would probably be more helpful if you could draw a parallel between what it [dune] provides vs what MSBuild does not- tannergooding

Hi @🏴☠ Geoff, big energy here! I can see lot's of words describing big things. I'd love to see an issue describing how you're going to maintain .NET itself. Or I guess, this fork of .NET. What resources are there, etc. - patrickk