.NOT

Can anyone provide a short, non-marketing-bullshit description of what this steaming pile of shit really is?  Is there ANY reason that a competent developer would ever use it?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.NET_Framework

>>15
Just because something is complex doesn't meant it can't be made efficient.

I've seen many games written in SEPPLES with dozens of dlls which can easily take up a lot more space than most .NET applications. Ever heard of dynamic loading? Precompilation? JITs?

I'd be surprised if it'd take much more than some 20-40MB upon loading, while executables would be as big as you'd make them (tiny ones are perfectly possible as it's just an extended PE file which contains the .NET bytecode), but don't ask me as I don't really use .NET anymore, however those were my experiences with it before.

>>15
It's not bad, actually. You may examine .NET executables with Microsoft's IL disassembler and see for yourself.

.NET executables - "assemblies" in .NET jargon - have a metadata section referencing every type used in the application. The CLR only loads the stuff that's needed.

The complete .NET library (Framework 4) is like ~50MB, but the redistributable packages are smaller. Most Windows machines today have it installed.

A "Hello world" in .NET is 3.5KB big.

The JIT compiler gives very decent performance.