[Cybiote]

I think the best way to think about such things is in terms of niches and ecosystem. The niche of functional and native is small and already well served by Haskell, Ocaml and even Rust to an extent.

The .net, python and JVM contain some of the largest ecosystems. Even if small relative to C#, the niche size and health of a functional language on .NET is much larger than if it were another native langauge. Speed, documentation and tooling might not exactly match C#, but are excellent in comparison to other functional languages.

In a similar vein, niche size for a transpiled functional language is much larger, more so if the language prioritizes playing well with its parent ecosystem. There is room enough for Fable, Clojurescript, elm, purescript and Reason to co-exist.

[mumblemumble]

Concrete example: for my latest side project, I chose F# because it was the most compelling (to me) language with a decent option for cross-platform GUI that isn't Electron. (Avalonia.FuncUI, which has a nice Elm-y feel.) The reason it had a good cross-platform GUI library available in the first place is very much because it lives on .NET, and can build on of the rest of the .NET ecosystem.

[hctaw]

Pure anecdote, but I've never seen a project become less native.

Meanwhile state of the art JITs (for .NET, JVM, Swift, and other traditionally managed runtimes) are increasingly blurring what it means for a language to be native and what the benefits for "native" even are.

So I don't think it's useful to think in terms of niches, because niches are constantly disappearing within our ecosystems. We're reaching a point where the implementation of a language is mostly a solved problem (throw it on top of some JIT for a bigger language) and the only meaningful innovation is in the semantics and syntax of a language for expressing intent and providing soundness.

If we're skating to where the puck is going here, I wouldn't say it makes sense to ignore native compilation for functional languages because that's a well served niche, but because AOT compilation itself is becoming niche.