Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Isn't the AOT story for F# pretty meh? AOT + System.Text.Json requires source generation as best I can tell, which F# doesn't support yet (to my knowledge).


In complex projects like this, Go requires manual scripting and build-time code generation. Arguably, writing a small shim project in C# is much easier. You don't exactly do a lot of JSON serialization in a compiler either way. Other than that - F# "just works" and does not require anything extra. It is just IL after all.

NativeAOT story itself is also interesting - I noted it in a sibling comment but .NET has much better base binary size and binary size scalability through stronger reachability analysis, metadata compression and pointer-rich binary sections dehydration at a small startup cost (it's still in the same ballpark). The compiler output is also better and so is whole program view driven devirtualization, something Go does not have. In the last 4 years, .NET's performance has improved more than Go's in the last 8. It is really good at text processing at both low and high level (only losing to Rust).

The most important part here is that TypeScript at Microsoft is a "first-party" customer. This means if they need additional compiler accommodations to improve their project experience from .NET, they could just raise it and they will be treated with priority.

This decision is technically and politically unsound at multiple levels at once. For example, they will need good WASM support. .NET's existing WASM support is considered "decent" and even that one is far from stellar, yet considered ahead of the Go one. All they needed was to allocate additional funding for the ongoing already working NativeAOT-LLVM-WASM prototype to very quickly get the full support of the target they needed. But alas.


I already hinted on BlueSky that they shouldn't wonder why .NET has adoption problems outside the traditional Windows ecosystem, when decisions like these are taken.


The nightmare of Midori never ends. And especially right as the platform, from the technical standpoint, is getting really good(tm).




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: