C Sharp (programming language)
C# (/ˌsiː ˈʃɑːrp/ see SHARP) is a general-purpose high-level programming language supporting multiple paradigms. C# encompasses static typing,: 4 strong typing, lexically scoped, imperative, declarative, functional, generic,: 22 object-oriented (class-based), and component-oriented programming disciplines.
| Paradigm | Multi-paradigm: structured, imperative, object-oriented, event-driven, task-driven, functional, generic, reflective, concurrent |
|---|---|
| Family | C |
| Designed by | Anders Hejlsberg (Microsoft) |
| Developer | Mads Torgersen (Microsoft) |
| First appeared | 2000 |
| Stable release | |
| Typing discipline | Static, dynamic, strong, safe, nominative, partly inferred |
| Memory management | automatic memory management |
| Platform | Common Language Infrastructure |
| License | |
| Filename extensions | .cs, .csx |
| Website | learn |
| Major implementations | |
| Visual C#, .NET, Mono, Universal Windows Platform Discontinued: .NET Framework, DotGNU | |
| Dialects | |
| Cω, Polyphonic C#, Enhanced C# | |
| Influenced by | |
| C++, Cω, Eiffel, F#, Haskell, Scala, Icon, J#, J++, Java, ML, Modula-3, Object Pascal, VB | |
| Influenced | |
| Chapel, Clojure, Crystal, D, J#, Dart, F#, Hack, Java, Kotlin, Nemerle, Oxygene, Rust, Swift, Vala, TypeScript | |
| |
The C# programming language was designed by Anders Hejlsberg from Microsoft in 2000 and was later approved as an international standard by Ecma (ECMA-334) in 2002 and ISO/IEC (ISO/IEC 23270 and 20619) in 2003. Microsoft introduced C# along with .NET Framework and Visual Studio, both of which were closed-source. At the time, Microsoft had no open-source products. Four years later, in 2004, a free and open-source project called Mono began, providing a cross-platform compiler and runtime environment for the C# programming language. A decade later, Microsoft released Visual Studio Code (code editor), Roslyn (compiler), and the unified .NET platform (software framework), all of which support C# and are free, open-source, and cross-platform. Mono also joined Microsoft but was not merged into .NET.
As of November 2023, the most recent stable version of the language is C# 12.0, which was released in 2023 in .NET 8.0.