[geodel]

Swift is Apple's own language. They have all the experts from lowest to highest level .

Writing a long winded report/article for fair technical evaluation of competing technologies would utter waste of time and no one would believe if answer were still Swift.

> I'd assume Go was among them. ...

I don't see any reason to evaluate Go at all.

[latchkey]

> I don't see any reason to evaluate Go at all.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/typescript/typescript-native-...

[MBCook]

But that ignores the fact Apple has a MASSIVE investment in Swift.

I think they already use Go in places, but they’ve clearly stated their intention to use Swift as much as possible where it’s reasonable.

I suspect they didn’t evaluate C++, Rust, Go, Erlang, Node, and 12 other things.

They have the experience from other Swift services to know it will perform well. Their people already know and use it.

If Swift (and the libraries used) weren’t good enough they’d get their people to improve it and then wait to switch off Java.

If you go to a Java shop and say you want to use C# for something Java can do, they’ll probably say to use Java.

I don’t read this post as “Swift is the best thing out there” but simply “hey Swift works great here too where you might not expect, it’s an option you might not have known about”.

[latchkey]

Microsoft has a massive investment in C#, but they still evaluated (and picked) golang.

[MBCook]

For TypeScript’s compiler, yes. I can see some real benefits, like Go is already common for some open source software they want to collaborate with non-MS people on. I suspect C# is much less common for that, and when targeting pure performance I suspect a bytecode language like C# wouldn’t have the same large gain.

I’m not in the .NET ecosystem so I don’t know if native AOT compilation to machine code is an option.

But anyway, in this case Apple is making an internal service for themselves. I think a better comparison for MS would be if they chose to rewrite some Windows service’s server back end. Would they choose Go for that?

I don’t know.

[pjmlp]

Native AOT is quite good enough nowadays, I think there were other politics at play.

Azure team has no issues using AI to convert from C++ to Rust, see RustNation UK 2025 talks.

Also they mention the reason being a port not a rewrite, yet they had anyway to rewrite the whole AST datastructures due to the weaker typesystem in Go.

Finally, the WebAssembly tooling to support Blazor is much more mature than what Go has.

[latchkey]

The real question isn’t whether they would choose it, but whether they’d be willing to evaluate it. Given their past behavior, as I mentioned above, it seems they are open to assessing options and selecting the best tool for the job.

[MBCook]

They are certainly far more open these days. I remember when it was Microsoft tools and Microsoft languages on Microsoft servers or nothing.

They’d have never touched Go with a 10 foot poll.

[wiseowise]

You just stated a comment away that Apple chose Swift because of massive investment. Microsoft has much, MUCH bigger investment in C#, but you find all the reason why your original argument is invalid.

The article is just a marketing for a team looking for promo, there’s no deep meaning or larger Apple scheme here.

[pjmlp]

I don't buy the reasoning.

First of all, it is a missed opportunity for Microsoft to have another vector for people to learn C#.

Secondly at BUILD session, Anders ended up explaning that they needed to rewrite the AST data structures anyway, given that Go type system is much inferior to Typescript.

And Go's story on WebAssembly is quite poor, when compared with Blazor toolchain, they are hopping Google will make the necessary improvements, required for the TypeScript playground and when running VSCode on the browser.

Finally, some of the key develpers involved on this effort have been layed off during the latest round.

[uticus]

This is fascinating. I really bought into the original explanation [0], but seems like it was not the (full) truth.

[0] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/typescript/typescript-native-...

[dontlaugh]

That still seems like a long term mistake to me, an evolutionary dead end.

[latchkey]

Does it matter? Today, they get a 10x improvement by switching. Mission accomplished.

X years from now, another language will come along and then they can switch to that for whatever benefit it has. It is just the nature of these things in technology.

[dontlaugh]

It can be a limitation much faster than that. They are in a situation where they won’t be able to improve further by much due to unavoidable costly abstractions in Go. If they’d picked something lower level there would be more possible after this first switch.

[latchkey]

My mistake, I shouldn't have put a number there since that is what you focused on.

Rewriting it in assembly is the way to go, but that has other tradeoffs.

[dontlaugh]

I’m not focused on a number, I’m just pointing out Go’s optimisation potential is lower than other options.

Of course it’s a trade off and their reasons are fine, but rewrites are expensive and disruptive. I would have picked something that can avoid a second rewrite later on.

[throwaway2037]

FYI: I have no dog in this fight.

    > unavoidable costly abstractions in Go

Can you share some?

[dontlaugh]

Implicit struct copies, garbage collection, interface dispatch, etc.

[hardwaresofton]

It absolutely was. All it takes is a quick look around other language ecosystems and JS itself.

Rust is an excellent language for embedding in other languages And underpinning developer tools.

That said, someday the new typescript binary will compile to WebAssembly, and it won’t matter much anyway.

[dontlaugh]

There is that opposite approach, yes. Add low-level control to TypeScript and get it to compile to WebAssembly, then the compiler itself can be fast as well.

I suspect they wanted the compiler speed more than they wanted a WASM target, though.

[geodel]

Yeah, while they are at it they can also learn on how to write OS for ARM architecture from Microsoft.