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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

> Pity that they didn't go with AOT compiled .NET, though.

Yeah. It seems to be unfashionable somewhat even within Microsoft.

(edit: it seems to be you and me and barely anyone else on HN advocating for C#)

Also, this is surprising because this was presented and led by Anders Hejlsberg, who is the creator of both C# and Typescript.

If anyone should have picked C# it would be him.

Hejlsberg seemed quite negative when it came to cross platform AOT compiled C# in several comments he's made, hinting at problems with both performance and maturity on certain platforms.

Projects like this are needed to improve C#'s cross platform AOT. Missed opportunity IMO.

Absolutely. Go is where it is because of the parent org's commitment to dogfooding it; strange that Microsoft is wasting this opportunity AND sending a negative message to .NET devs.

Sure, but this team's focus is on Typescript, not C# / cross-platform AOT; there's only so much time in a day. Others can pick it up I'm sure.

But I think it's also an indication that Typescript may be bigger and more important for Microsoft than C#/.NET is at this time. It's definitely much more used than C# is according to this non-representative survey of Stack Overflow (https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology).

At the same time, if anyone can make a language choice, it's him - the fact he didn't pick his own language is high praise for both himself and his neutrality, and the Go language.

Go compiler tooklit works very well on all the OSes. That would be a consideration.

So does the .NET compiler. That is not the issue.

This was also surprising to me – C# is a really awesome and modern language.

I happened to be doing a lot of C# and .NET dev when all this transition was happening, and it was very cool to be able to run .NET in Linux. C# is a powerful language with great and constantly evolving ideas in it.

But then all the stuff between the runtimes, API surfaces, Core vs Framework, etc all got extremely confusing and off-putting. It was necessary to bring all these ecosystems together, but I wonder if that kept people away for a bit? Not sure.

I think the main thing is that they are porting, not re-writing. Current tsc is functional by nature and that's makes go better fit.

I think the much larger ask C# couldn't answer is the "expressive" access to low level struct layout[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10qowKUW82U&t=769s

All Azure contributions to CNCF are using a mix of Go and Rust, mostly.

Here is a kind of weird, given the team.

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