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I really wish the runner agent was written in something more portable than .NET. That choice feels like something purely political because they’re owned by Microsoft. I doubt and independent organization would have chosen it before other excellent choices such as Go, Rust etc.

Currently hosting the runner on e.g. FreeBSD or custom embedded systems is not supported (or even possible).

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It's not because they're owned by Microsoft, at least not in the way you think.

It's because GitHub Actions is rebranded Azure Pipelines.

That a team at GitHub has been given a pile of Microsoft authored code is honestly much more concerning. They don't seem to understand it in its entirety either.

I didn't want to believe it, but then I did a search through their repo:

```

  else if (value.Contains("Microsoft.Azure.DevOps"))
                {
                    m_typeName = value.Replace("Microsoft.Azure.DevOps", "GitHub");
                   m_typeName = m_typeName.Substring(0, m_typeName.IndexOf(",")) + ", Sdk";

                }

```

Which repo?

https://github.com/actions/runner/search?q=Azure

You can also compare the source code structure to the Azure Devops Pipeline agent's to tell pretty easily that the github runner is a fork what has been edited to process the somewhat different format of the actions YAML.

https://github.com/microsoft/azure-pipelines-agent/

Then it's probably faster and easier to rewrite it in Go from scratch.

Most of the people who worked on Azure Pipelines got transferred to GitHub to work on Actions. You can even see the same names of developers contributing code to both the GitHub runner and the Azure DevOps agent.

There is an ongoing project built on top of act (the "local" github runner) that accomplishes this: https://github.com/ChristopherHX/github-act-runner

It runs on Windows, Linux and Mac surely? How much more portable do you need?

There are other operating systems and CPU architectures. It's a boon for open source projects to be able to have CI on all the BSDs, and illumos, and Plan 9, and even weirder things.

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