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Comment by mort96 | Hacker News Reader

Meh, I could've been curious about playing with Swift if it wasn't so Apple-centric. Just like I could've been curious about playing with C# if it wasn't so Microsoft-centric.

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I don't feel C# is that Microsoft-centric anymore - not after the release of Roslyn.

It works well on Windows, macOS, iOS, Android and I suspect Linux as well (but I never use Linux, hence I can't be sure). And if you want a multiplatform UI there's some decent options like Avalonia UI [0].

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[0]: https://avaloniaui.net/

I think the evolution of C# beyond Microsoft is overplayed. The entire tooling around the language remains a Microsoft product, with all the attendant Microsoft nonsense. It has opt out telemetry, even on Linux, and like every other MS product is currently having AI force-fed down its throat. It's only a matter of time until a compiler update automatically uploads all your code to Microsoft Azure Recall .net Passport Hotmail ft. the Copilot dancers.

If you're developing Windows apps or Windows games, C# is a fine choice; much as Swift is a fine choice for Apple apps. But no one worried about Apple's control of Swift should be pointing people to C# with a straight face.

Microsft management cleary doesn't want VSCode to have feature parity with VS, and C# DevKit is also under the same license as VS Professional.

This routinely pulls the carpet under the .NET team effort to widespread .NET adoption.

When Microsoft ported C# to Linux, they actually held off on releasing it because Linux ran C# applications better than Windows OS. They took time to refactor the code so Windows OS and Linux where on par. I cannot remember the source video where Microsoft employees talking about it is. The video was right after the .NET Core initial release.

That being said. Microsoft does not want a cross-platform C# that works on Linux. This is why their .NET MAUI does not support Linux and a 3rd party framework will be needed.

Only reason I would choose C# for non-Windows is because of existing / legacy code base. Any new application would use language and libraries that fit the problem versus trying to fit C# as the solution to all.

Mono actually is the primary project that greatly improved the C# world and evolved the latest .NET infrastructure, not Microsoft. Mono developers actually cleaner APIs. Even Microsoft Visual Studio for Mac is just Mono Developer with the Linux supporting bits removed.

Is it that Apple made it and puts resources into it that makes it Apple-centric? If so, is that truly important?

I wonder why LLVM isn’t also considered Apple-centric by the same thought process.

To be fair, LLVM wasn't an Apple-initiated project, but one Apple noticed and decided to adopt later on (they hired Chris Latner in 2005; LLVM began in 2000, and had its first public stable release in 2003).

Unlike Swift, there was never a period of time where LLVM only worked exclusively on Apples own OS's or hardware. From the get go, you could run early versions of LLVM on Windows. In Swift's case, Linux support came in 2016, 1.5 years after Swift's initial release in 2014, then Windows support came 6 years later in v5 (2020).

If Apple didn't want to let Swift suffer the reputation of being an Apple-only language they should've invested more into cross platform support much earlier on. Yes, today Apple and everyone else can say, 'Swift is cross-platform', but dig deeper into the history of Swift and its clear that from the get go, Apple treated non-Apple OS support as an afterthought.

It's not that Apple puts resources into it. It's that, yes, Apple made it, and its only raison d'etre is to replace Objective-C for Apple platforms.

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