The wider .NET ecosystem is lacking when trying to step out the mainline. I don't bother hunting for unused, partially implemented .NET libraries anymore and just call out to a process or API call when needing to get something done.
It's not ideal, but when there isn't a good option isn't available in .NET it's usually available in Python/npm. Typically I'll use background jobs when calling out of process for added resiliency/replayability and observability.
Not sure I agree. Also depends of the domain. The python ecosystem is of course a lot richer for anything AI. But try to open, manipulate and export spreadsheets. In python you pretty much need a different library for every excel file format (xls, xlsx, etc) and usually the more file formats a library can handle, the least capable it is (eg pandas). In .net you have libraries like spreadsheetgear that are super powerful, including their own excel calculation engine. I see nothing remotely close in python.
The point is that a good library usually exists for some language, which is not necessarily the one you are currently using.
IMHO, we don't lack good libraries in XY, we are lacking good interop. Going through REST or stdio is quite painful just to render PDF (or export spreadsheet, ...)
I'm using of a lot of ComfyUI Workflows, Custom Nodes, Image and Audio classifiers relying on PyTorch, supervision, ultralytics, MediaPipe, OpenCV, onnxruntime, pandas, numpy that says otherwise. There are some equivalents, but the ecosystems aren't playing in the same ballpark.
You're misrepresenting reality, companies aren't choosing .NET for their AI workflows. There's nothing like ComfyUI, the ecosystems are worlds apart, it's not even close.
> There is hardly anything that isn't available in .NET, the main problem is being willing to pay for tooling.
Here you're saying .NET has nearly everything, you just need to pay for it sometimes.
> And even so, there are .NET bindings for a few of those libraries like PyTorch, OpenCV and ONNX Runtime.
As apparently AI is no problem for .NET either since it has some bindings. So I really didn't need to use Python if I was prepared to pay for some tools as "There is hardly anything that isn't available in .NET" - misrepresent the situation much?
As if that does anything to help the different Python packages you need. Yeah you could rewrite every Python package built on top of it, or you know, shell out to a process or API.
Nearly everything, means not everything, that something is not covered, AI tools for example.
Existing PyTorch, OpenCV and ONNX Runtime bindings doesn't meant there is a solution for every Python package out there.
However, I will state, since you're the one driving the discussion down this path, that there are many AI scenarios that are nicely taken care by .NET and Windows tooling like WindowsML, which work good enough for many Microsoft shops scenarios.
> Nearly everything, means not everything, that something is not covered, AI tools for example.
Yeah I know some things that aren't covered, like everything I've listed in my first comment that I'm currently shelling out to Python for.
> Existing PyTorch, OpenCV and ONNX Runtime bindings doesn't meant there is a solution for every Python package out
there.
So why are you trying to use some scattered bindings to misrepresent .NET's AI capabilities? Your intent has been to say there's no need to use anything else since .NET basically has it all - to someone who needs to shell out to Python, because .NET didn't have what I needed.
> many AI scenarios that are nicely taken care by .NET and Windows tooling like WindowsML, which work good enough for many Microsoft shops scenarios.
So intead of shelling out to Python, I could've just.. replaced my inexpensive Linux servers and deploy to Window Servers and Azure??? Thanks for the advice, but I'll stick to the easiest solution that actually works.
> Not everything needs to be Python.
No, just everything I need to shell out to Python for, i.e. my entire point.
It's not ideal, but when there isn't a good option isn't available in .NET it's usually available in Python/npm. Typically I'll use background jobs when calling out of process for added resiliency/replayability and observability.