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Comment by thayne | Hacker News Reader

I have similar concerns about c# as I do about swift.

I'm less concerned about go, because unlike swift and c# it was designed from the beginning to be cross-platform and if anything Linux is the best supported OS. But barely so. Also, if Google were to discontinue support, or change the license, or do something else disruptive, I have more faith that the ecosystem would create a fork to continue the language.

FWIW, my biggest concern isn't that the language would be completely abandoned, it is that the company would diminish or drop support for tooling on OSes and editors and IDEs that compete with the company's products (Mac OS and Xcode for apple, Windows and Visual Studio for MS).

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> I'm less concerned about go, because unlike swift and c# it was designed from the beginning to be cross-platform and if anything Linux is the best supported OS

No it wasn’t. There were so many foot guns for windows and in fact to this day you cant use CGO with MSVC (insane to me).

I can’t even say with a straight face today that Windows is the best supported OS for C#, because it’s not true

Microsoft’s market position is reliant on Linux and access to Linux development to keep Azure competitive. Cross-platform capabilities on the .Net VM are critical to compete with the JVM and associated databases. C# has been windows-first for a while, but the core cross-platform capabilities are not going to disappear, the tooling is all CLI based/capable now, the entanglements tend to be platform and service based.

That said, F# was years ahead of C# in features C# is still chasing, and is driven mostly by the open source community. That community is more in academic and finance areas where Linux-first is common. The language is standardized and plugged into VM improvements over time.

Frankly, I see the lesser degree of entanglement with MS corporate interests as a boon for the language and its ecosystems long-term utility.

From what I understand, LSP support for c# isn't very good, and is from third parties, not MS themselves, because they want you to us Visual Studio on Windows.

Microsoft provides C# LSP for VSCode (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-dotne...).

The problem is that it's closed source, and its license specifically prohibits its use with anything other than VSCode. Unfortunately, this is becoming the usual modus operandi for first-party Microsoft extensions for VSCode for all the talk about how they "love open source".

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