This is Anders Hejlsberg, the creator of C#, working on a politically important project at Microsoft. That's what I mean by political benefit. The larger open source world doesn't matter for this decision which is why this is a simple announcement of an internal Microsoft decision rather than an invitation for comments ahead of time.
I’m sure Microsoft’s strategy department would disagree with you. As a c# devotee - I get that you’re upset. And you may want to update your priors on where c# sits in Microsoft’s current world. But I think it’s a mistake to imagine this isn’t a well reasoned decision.
They can disagree if they want but as a career-long Microsoft developer they can't fool me that easily. I'm not even complaining, I'm just stating a fact that high-level steering decisions like this are made in Teams meetings between Microsoft employees, not in open discussion with the community. It's the same in .NET, which is a very open source project whose highest-level decisions are, nonetheless, made in Teams meetings between Microsoft employees and then announced to the public. I'm fine with this but let's not kid ourselves about it.
That said, I must have misstated my opinion if it seems like I didn't think they have a good reason. This is Anders Hejlsberg. The guy is a genius; he definitely has a good reason. They just didn't say what it is in this blog post (but did elsewhere in a podcast video linked in the HN thread).
> The larger open source world doesn't matter for this decision
It obviously does because the larger open source world are huge users of Typescript. This isn't some business-only Excel / PowerBI type product.
To put it another way, I think a lot of people would get quite pissed if tsc was going to be rewritten in C# because of the obvious headaches that's going to cause to users. Go is pretty much the perfect option from a user's point of view - it generates self-contained statically linked binaries.
It would have a substantial risk for the typescript project. Many people would see it as an unwanted and hostile push of a Microsoft technology on the typescript community.
And there would be logistical problems. With go, you just need to distribute the executable, but with c#, you also need a .net runtime, and on any platform that isn't Windows that almost certainly isn't already installed. And even if it is, you have to worry if the runtime is sufficiently up to date.
If they used c# there is a chance the community might fork typescript, or switch to something else, and that might not be a gamble MS would want to take just to get more exposure for c#.
Okay, not to be petty here but, it's important to note that on his GitHub he did not star the dotnet repository but has starred multiple go repos and multiple other c++ and TS repos
It’s always the same response, c# was crappy but it’s not crappy anymore. Well guess what, Go has been not crappy for a lot longer than C# has been not crappy, maybe that’s part of the reason people like it more.
> Well guess what, Go has been not crappy for a lot longer than C# has been not crappy, maybe that’s part of the reason people like it more.
Nobody said anything about who likes what more, nor does that even matter in the context of the original claim that .NET doesn't have a good runtime outside of Windows.
