Why specflow is needed in cucumber even its supporting BDD Tools

Question

I am trying to find why specflow is needed for developing BDD test automation framework using .NET. As Cucumber itself is a BDD Tool, why cant we use Cucumber directly in .NET projects?

Answer 1

Cucumber is an application that reads Gherkin syntax plain text specification files and runs ruby files to execute those specifications.

Specflow is a 'port' of cucumber for .net that also uses Gherkin syntax files but wires them up to .net code. If you look at the cucumber docs it states that to use cucumber in .net you do it via SpecFlow.

I don't think you can run cucumber in .net unless you are thinking of using iron ruby...