by Co-Founder & CTO ofĀ Tracebit
When we started building Tracebitāāāa B2B SaaS security productāāāone of my key early decisions was to pick a programming language. While many startups gravitate toward Python, TypeScript, Golang, or Rust, I went a different way: C#.
Productivity First
I think a stack which lets you spend time on what actually matters is the core of a great developer experience. I wanted:
- an expressive, fully-featured language which would let us quickly test and refine ideas
- the assurance offered by static types when maintaining and refactoring code
- a stable platform that would still work well as our team and codebase grew
C# has allowed us to be highly productive from the earliest days and it feels like a really solid foundation to build on.
Modern, Open & Cross-Platform
I was pleasantly surprised to find thatĀ .NET is now fully open source and MIT-licensed. The cross-platform support lets us develop on MacBooks, and deploy to Linux containers on ARM cores. Microsoftās āchiseledā container images are a nice touch too, giving us a lean deployment option which minimizes CVE management.
Popularity
Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2024
C# consistently ranks as a highly popular programming language, though perhaps without generating the buzz that some other languages mightāāāespecially among startups! This established presence gives us real advantages:
- A great talent pool from which to hire
- Plenty of world-class libraries at our fingertips
- Lots of documentation and examples when needed
- Well-traveled paths with fewer unexpected roadblocks
Rich StandardĀ Library
TheĀ .NET ecosystem comes with quality libraries for just about everything weāve needed. Along with the usual suspects (collections, JSON processing, etc), Entity Framework and ASP.NET stand out as excellent frameworks in which to build.
This has been particularly valuable for us as a security product. We have high standards for dependencies, and having so many trusted and well-maintained components available has saved us a lot of time!
Expressive languageĀ features
C# as a language has many nice features, such as LINQ, pattern-matching, anonymous functions, primary constructors and null-coalescing operators that make it both expressive and succinct. Iāve honestly found it a pleasure to read and write.
When it comes to the type system, I think C# has found a really nice balanceāāāitās powerful without feeling overly complex. I particularly like the support for generics, record types, and reflection.
Great Tooling
The development ecosystem offers some excellent tools:
- Powerful IDEs with great debugging and refactoring support
- Great static analyzers that will often suggest fixes automatically
- Sophisticated tooling for memory profiling and runtime diagnostics
These make it a joy to work with the language, and help avoid nasty surprises in production.
Itās Fast
Note: This graphic has been updated from the original post with the latest TechEmpower results.
While performance wasnāt our main reason for choosing C#, itās certainly a nice advantage. Itās clearly a priority for theĀ .NET team and each release brings meaningful performance improvements. We process a lot of data on behalf of our customers and Iāve been very impressed by the throughput weāve been able to achieve with simple and idiomatic C#āāāwhile still offering many options to optimize hot code paths if necessary.
How ItāsĀ Going
After thousands of commits and over 100,000 lines of code, Iām very happy with our choice. Weāve brought on team members who had never used C# before, and everyoneās become productive surprisingly quicklyāāāshipping code to production on their first day.
No programming language is perfect for every situation, and what works for us might not work for everyone. But C# has been a key part of Tracebitās success so far. If youāve overlooked C# based on outdated perceptions (like I almost did), Iād definitely recommend taking a closer look!
