back to article .NET Core 2.1 – huh, yeah – what is it good for? Bing, apparently

Microsoft's Bing search engine now runs on an open-source platform - .NET Core 2.1, to be precise. Famous for chowing down on its own dog food, Microsoft's admission is not altogether surprising. What does raise a bushy eyebrow is how capable it shows the open-sourced framework to be. Bing – for those that rarely venture …

  1. The Mighty Biff
    Meh

    When well they adding Reporting though? Stuff your noncy AI bollox and give us something useful.

    1. TheVogon

      "Bing – for those that rarely venture beyond the ad-festooned walls of Google or won't leave the realms of DuckDuckGo without a handy tinfoil hat"

      DDG actually uses Bing as a primary data source.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    we started an effort to make the code portable across .NET implementations, rather than relying on libraries only available on Windows [ms]

    I guess they're moving to Linux, like everyone else.

    And no, it's not to save on licences.

    1. Korev Silver badge

      Maybe hoping developers will use .NET on mobile phones where MS has almost no market share?

      1. SolidSquid

        Would make sense given their purchase of Xamarin a couple of years ago

  3. jonha
    Meh

    "Bing [...] handles thousands of search requests every second using servers spread over many data centres across the globe."

    That doesn't sound very impressive. If and when bing.com scales well enough to outperform the Big G servers, then I might perhaps think about exercising one of my eyebrows.

    1. IneptAdept

      Down voted you because it is not just how Bing! works.

      It is showing off how far the framework has come which you seem to of ignored completely.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        "It is showing off how far the framework has come which you seem to of ignored completely."

        without knowing how much metal they lobbed at the problem (it's M$ so shit tons).

        It shows nothing of the sort..

        You can make any old shit look fast by using way more resources than you would need too, if you weren't using shit.

        Once had M$ quote that we required 50+ servers for a system using their solution.

        I had it running on 4 with more users.

        1. IneptAdept

          Well I would maybe take your opinion abit more seriously but you are posting as anonymous so......

        2. IneptAdept

          And as a .NET Dev I know exactly how much more efficient it is than the full fat framework, so as I said maybe put a name to your post or be ignored

        3. Anonymous Bullard

          They're comparing .NET fat with .NET core - that's all.

          But of course core will perform better - thanks to it being open source, it's had outsiders contributing to optimisations (blog post confirms this).

      2. bombastic bob Silver badge
        FAIL

        "It is showing off how far the framework has come gone

        fixed it for you. They have 'gone too far' I would imagine. I've always *HATED* ".Not" especially for the desktop world (and that 'C-pound' language that goes with it).

        maybe it has a tiny amount of sense on the server end (as compared to other silly things like NodeJS). however, you'd do a LOT better with native C code built as custom apache modules [for example], or just do some really clever PHP code instead, limit the bloat, call external C programs to do the REAL work, leverage CGI, etc. and make the system overall efficient _INSTEAD_ of, well, ".Notty"... AND portable across multiple operating systems!

        /me wonders if their 'comparison' was a windows server using old code against a windows server running tweeked code. How about comparing it against a LINUX or FreeBSD server running Apache (or any OTHER web server for that matter) with well written NATIVE code?

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          You obviously don't do any real-world development.

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Sorry, bombastic_bob, there are damned few people in the world that I'd let in a building where C is being used for server side C code and all of them have engineer somewhere in their title, not "developer." There is zero forgiveness in C. If a C-like language is called for then Java (C++ on LSD), C# with .NET Core, and the like is something I'd rather seen used; something with training-wheels. Hell, desktop/workstation-side you even have the Python-family for stitching together those external C-based blocks of one sort or another.

          You shoot your own argument down in the second paragraph when you include "well written" in front of "NATIVE code" there.

        3. MJI Silver badge

          I have never come across C£

          What is this language you speak of?

          1. Nick Ryan Silver badge

            Re: I have never come across C£

            If they actually used the musical sharp symbol then perhaps I'd be more forgiving... there it is almost always C-hash. As in a bit (lot) of a hash. It has improved, of course, but many chunks of it want to make me gouge my eyes out in despair at the hoops to do something simple, or how relatively simple things have been made as obfuscated as possible for, well, no reason whatsoever.

            It's a useful language for some things, not very useful for others. Same goes for any language before the fanboy nutjobs jump in...

            1. MJI Silver badge

              Re: I have never come across C£

              I have heard of C hash and it is pretty usefull

              To be honest should be called C noughts & crosses

  4. Matthew Smith

    "Bing handles thousands of search requests every second "

    Wow, Bing is more popular than I thought it was.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Big Brother

      Don't forget, everything you type into the start menu is sent to bing.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Top bing searches:

      1. "google"

      2. "firefox"

      3. "midget porn"

      4. "how do i clear history"

      1. Deltics

        You missed one:

        5. Alternative to Bing

        (probably should be higher up the list than #5 as well)

      2. picturethis
        Meh

        FTFY:

        ----

        Top bing searches:

        1. "google" "chrome download"

        2. "firefox" "firefox offline installer"

        3. "midget porn"

        4. "how do i clear history"

        ----

        In the "old" days I used to call IE the "firefox download/installer", it looks like Bing has assumed that role. I run it once only if I don't have a thumb-drive handy with firefox offline installer on it. It's okay if it's out of date, I will update after the install.

        I have to admit that lately I have to "hold my nose" with firefox's latest crap because it stinks so much. If there's a palemoon available for the OS I'm on, I will use that instead.

        Chrome is not my first choice for a browser due to the auto-updates and because of google data privacy gobbling attitude - I also don't use google for searching (at least not directly). Either duckduckgo or startpage. Duckduckgo actually honors your search term requests, unlike google that ignores them when they have a paid avertiser key word match and then magically all of their products override search terms and show up in the first 5 pages of results..

        Using google has become VERY irritating not to mention, very time-consuming having to read and then ignore their "search-vertisements" (you heard the term coined here first :) in the first 10 pages of returned results. Hey google, do you think nobody notices this crap? And I've never liked the fact the returned result link goes back through a google server first before going to the site and they hide this fact by not showing the true URL in the link. "do no evil" - I call BS.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    What is JIT good for?

    So why did we even use JIT compilation in the first place? I blame Java.

    1. Steve Channell
      Pint

      Re: What is JIT good for?

      JIT is older than Java by a couple of decades thanks to Pascal p-code, including Microsoft's Pascal and COBOL runtimes. The new technique of deployment ngen is closer to the OSF ANDF (as is LLVM).

      Performance test of .net core CLR compared to Java show it spanking Java..

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: What is JIT good for?

        I know how old JIT is, I used to program in LISP decades ago. But as for JIT vs. traditional compilers, a test I often used to set my junior programmers was to try beating Microsoft Visual C++ at optimising a piece of code. Even back in the days of V1.52c that was a difficult thing to do.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: What is JIT good for?

          ...beating Microsoft Visual C++ at optimising...

          ...is a pretty easy thing to do. Write a semi-complicated function and the optimiser generally gives up halfway through. At least it used to. Even when it manages to make it to the end of the function, I never found myself suitably impressed with its results. (To be fair I haven't really looked too much into the code it generates these days.)

          The Intel compiler on the other hand... That is and always has been a serious optimiser when it wants to be. The things I've seen it do to code I wouldn't want to talk about in polite conversation.

      2. Deltics

        Re: What is JIT good for?

        Benchmarketing can be used to "prove" anything. There is only limited correlation between "performance tests" and real-world performance.

        (which isn't to say that Java isn't slower in the real-world, only that performance tests don't prove that - the real world does).

    2. bombastic bob Silver badge
      Flame

      Re: What is JIT good for?

      not to be anal retentive, but Java is typically a compiled language, generating a P-code [or sometimes native] binary. JavaScript, on the other hand, requires a JIT compiler because

      *ahem*

      so-called JavaScript "developers" *FELT* that their own signfiicance was too little on 'teh intarwebs', and so they were COMPELLED to invent/inject B.S. javascript "code" into EVERYTHING web-related, from server to client, particularly when related to AD SERVERS, because, tracking. And so it's everywhere, and the more lazy J.S. "developers" propagate it via the use of CDN-delivered bloatware libraries (like JQuery, NodeJS).

      And so these bloatware libraries take SO long to interpret, that their bloat-code runs slow, so they invented JIT compilers for both client and server side to try and 'compensate'. Nevermind the ENTIRE MODEL is flawed to begin with, as evidenced by a particular worthless function being pulled by a developer, causing chaos throughout the user base. And so on.

      ok - rant complete. applying fire extinguisher now.

  6. This post has been deleted by its author

  7. Google

    I've just migrated a personal site with about a hundred daily users from Windows to the cheapest Ubuntu VPS my provider offers. This means half the processor power and memory compared to the Windows VPS and a third of the price. They even have special offer going on Ubuntu boxes saving me even more monthly costs.

    The MS SQL database was replaced with MariaDB, simply because MS SQL doesn't support 18.04 (yet, or at least when I commenced migrating my core site). Though there were some minor niggles the EF Mysql provider works fine.

    Performance is just as good if not better (page requests consistently below half a second) and it turns out administration of a Linux box is a lot easier if not more fun. Setting up Nginx with Letsencrypt was a breeze as was forwarding traffic to the dotnet process.

    It's a funny world when I can wholeheartedly recommend .Net devs to migrate their sites to Ubuntu.

    1. bombastic bob Silver badge
      Linux

      "It's a funny world when I can wholeheartedly recommend .Net devs to migrate their sites to Ubuntu."

      I'd suggest weaning off of ".Not", too. They can thank me later.

    2. Anonymous Bullard
      Linux

      It's a funny world when I can wholeheartedly recommend .Net devs to migrate their sites to Ubuntu.

      Yes, same here! No more pissing about with IIS... and editing XML configs in notepad over RDP.

      And thanks to Rider, I can also develop on Linux. :D

  8. Deltics
    Pint

    Compilation in the deployment process...

    So .net core is faster because they finally fixed a bunch of problems with ngen that prevented it from delivering on the promise ? Cool.

  9. Hans 1
    FAIL

    El'Reg

    May I humbly point out to your scribe that DuckDuckGo uses Bing! as a search engine.

    That Bing! uses advertising as well.

    BTW, are we sure that the Bing! servers still run on Windows ? I mean, .Net 2.1 is available for Linux .... if they want even better search performance/watt, Linux is the way!

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