[oaiey]

As a long term observer: definitely not a goal. But you have to be clear here: JavaScript and C# both are OO languages, both are having origins stories in Java/C++, both are facing the same niche (system development), same challenges (processor counts, ...) and so on. And then, you put teams on it which look left and right when they face a problem and then you wonder that they reuse what they like?

C# language team is also really good. They did not do a lot of mistakes in the 25+ years. They are a very valid source of OO and OO-hybrid concepts. It is not only TS/JS but also Java and C++ who often look to C#.

The story was not to transform C# code to JS but to use C# to write the code in the first place and transpile it. Not for the sake of having .NET usage but for the sake of having a good IDE.

[m132]

> They did not do a lot of mistakes in the 25+ years

If my memory serves, .NET and WinFS were the two major forces that sunk Longhorn, and both have been given their walking papers after the reset [1].

.NET and C# have grown to be mature and well-engineered projects, but the road there was certainly not without bumps. It's just that a lot of the bad parts haven't spilled outside of Microsoft, thankfully.

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2005/05/26/dotnet_longhorn/

[Sammi]

Are we mixing the language and the runtime here? C# the language seems weirdly free of weirdness and footguns.

[moron4hire]

.NET was already a going concern before Longhorn even started. What sank Longhorn was the fact that writing an OS from scratch is hard and maintaining compatibility with existing OSes in the process is even harder, especially when you're adopting a completely new architecture. Longhorn would have been a microkernel running 100% on the .NET runtime, mainline Windows is a monolithic kernel written in C++. I don't know how it would have ever worked, whether .NET was "perfect" or not.

[oaiey]

The article is presenting some stuff mixed up. Had nothing to do with the language or the framework. WinFS was a database product. Over engineered and abstract.

.NET and C# were researched a lot for operating system usage (Midori, Singularity) but that was after Longhorn.

The operating system group UI toolkits was a further problem and they pivoted there dozen of times in the years. Particular for a C++ based os group.

But the death of longhorn was ultimately about the security restart of Bill Gates

[pjmlp]

Nope, what sunk Longhorn was politics.

Windows team is a C++ kingdom, and those devs will not adopt .NET even at gun point.

They redid Longhorn with COM and called it WinRT, irony of ironies, WinRT applications run slower than .NET with COM reference counting all over the place.

Google has showed those folks what happens when everyone plays on the same team, and now it owns the mobile phone market, a managed userspace with 70% world market.