It's Microsoft-driven, not community-driven. For the past 25 years the Microsoft camp has either never understood, or hasn't cared about, that distinction.

Each of those links shows thousands of contributors not connected to Microsoft, but do go on believing there's no community, or that it's a terrible thing that people rely on Microsoft to produce a free, open source, solid product they can depend on. That's the reason it's Microsoft-driven, because they've mostly been doing just fine as a steward, and it being MIT licensed means MS knows the community can take over if they step too far out of line.

Not the point. Who's leading? That's the point. Not impressed with your example of a corporate behemoth using free labor. That's the wrong kind of Free.

> Not the point. Who's leading? That's the point.

No, the point is, who cares as long as everyone is happy with the direction?

Not quite the same thing though, is it? And if you're not happy with the direction then you're stuck.

I think this may be a better way to explain it. Supposed someone comes up with a C# proposal that defines a way to introduce the Result type enum system that Rust has as a replacement for Exceptions. Supposed this is a pretty solid plan, easy transition, we can make a magic button that all the code bases when upgrading to the next version of C# just has to press the magic button and its done. No more expcetions, you now have Result return types. Lets also supposed this proposal has a large amount of the community on board with it. At the end of the day, that proposal will live or die by someone (or some group) at Microsoft.

Now granted, I don't know if it would be different with Java and Oracle. But that is the point. A significant enough change proposal for C#, supposed like above, a change proposal that goes against where Microsoft thinks the development path of C# should be, that is the important bit. So long as contributions and feature request align with Microsoft's interest, its all good, but if the community has large support for a contribution or change request that doesn't align, then it may be different.

Addition: Although arguably, this is true for most languages. Even FOSS languages have some type of leadership that those big shifting proposals will live and die with. Not intending to cast anyone in a bad light, but just a project leader and a project I am familiar with. If a proposal that was as ground shifting as the proposed above was suggested for Zig, whether or not the project does it, the decision of whether to do it may live or die depending on Andrew Kelly or his close knit team of contributors to Zig. Same could be said about Rust, the project has leadership and they could kill a popular proposal. Even outside of languages. The linux kernel, a feature or restructure may live or die by the hand of Linus Torvalds.

> So long as contributions and feature request align with Microsoft's interest, its all good, but if the community has large support for a contribution or change request that doesn't align, then it may be different.

Speculation about what Microsoft may do or may not do in response to community pressure is a weird kind of criticism. I can invent all sorts of fictional boogeymen too. What if Linus has a psychotic break and wants to make the Linux syscall interface mimic the Windows NT kernel?

People would do exactly what I'm suggesting here: fork and continue development without him.

As you also say, leadership means leading, and Microsoft takes backwards compatibility very seriously, and that's why people trust them and use their offerings, sometimes instead of open source offerings.

A change like that would invalidate every tutorial and document ever written about C# over 25 years, so is it really C# anymore? I don't think anyone would make that change. It's simple to fork the MIT licensed C# compiler, call it C* and make that transition in a language that is definitely no longer C#. I just don't think this is a good example.

For good examples, see the language evolution that has actually taken place which has been community driven in many cases. Records, tuples, the evolution of type constraints have all been started from community feedback, and are backwards compatible.

As a final note, a comment on "aligning with Microsoft's interests". They are interested in two things for .NET: selling Azure hosting, and incentivizing Windows programming. Making the software development experience pleasant, robust, predictable and backwards compatible are the objectives, so devs are incentivized to pay them to program on their OS, target your program to their OS, or run your software on their cloud infra. I really don't see the problem.

Java still has the Java Community Process. Oracle has a thumb on the scale, but it's still a largely community-driven process. The .NET community has nothing even approaching this level of community and openness. Microsoft is in the driver's seat.

Not exactly related to conversation but given that you mentioned (discriminated) unions, here are notes on recent design work:

https://github.com/dotnet/csharplang/blob/main/meetings/2024...

https://github.com/dotnet/csharplang/blob/main/meetings/2024...

Would be really nice to have. I hope we can get it with something like optionals you see in Rust or Swift. And really, with optionals, something like Swift's guard let statements.