[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.