Comment by atombender
3 months ago
C# is a great language, but it's been hampered by slow transition towards AOT.
My understanding (not having used it much, precisely because of this) is that AOT is still quite lacking; not very performant and not so seamless when it comes to cross-platform targeting. Do you know if things have gotten better recently?
I think fhat Microsoft had dropped the old .NET platform (CLR and so on) sooner and really nailed the AOT experience, they may have had a chance at competing with Go and even Rust and C++ for some things, but I suspect that ship has sailed, as it has for languages like D and Nim.
C# (well, .NET, because that's what does JIT/AOT compilation of the bytecode) is not transitioning to AOT. NativeAOT is just one of the ways to publish .NET applications for scenarios where it is desirable. Having JIT is a huge boon to a number of scenarios too, for example it is basically impossible to implement a competitive Regex engine with JIT compilation for the patterns in Go (aside from other limitations like not having SIMD primitives).
Transition to better AOT, .NET has had AOT support since version 1.0, even if using NGEN is a bit clunky.