JavaScript is one of the most common compile targets. "Who's the better JavaScript" was the most contested field a decade ago. These are not just toy languages - Facebook has Flow and Google has Dart. Both companies are far more web-adjacent than Microsoft. Yet Typescript won.
edit: I think it was considered, but go was a better fit
I guess I... just got bored of it, and fed up of Microsoft. I came to hate Windows and having to work on Windows so much that it sort of tainted C# for me. I'm not saying I'd never use it again but, whilst it will run cross-platform nowadays, so will loads of other languages and frameworks, so it's never at the top of the list when it comes to choosing something for a new project.
As for TypeScript? Absolutely loathe it. I'll use it professionally when I have to, but I'd never use it for one of my own projects. It's just so ugly I don't even like looking at it. I get why people like it but, for me, it's not enough. If I'm staring at something all day then, I'm sorry, it can't be ugly.
But, strangely, I still use and enjoy VS Code from Microsoft, and have no plans to switch to anything else.
(I also still have an Office subscription - or whatever it is Microsoft are calling that suite nowadays, I don't care - because I still use both Excel and Word fairly frequently. I could probably get by without, but I actually quite like Office - even on the Mac.)
The thing is, now most things I do target some flavour of Linux - and although I could write C# and target Linux with absolutely no problem - there are a lot of other options that C# has to complete with. Granted those options would also, at least in theory, have been viable options on Windows but it definitely would have felt a bit like paddling against the flow to host Ruby on Rails or Python or whatever on Windows.
And if I want to target command line or desktop with something cross-platform I'm going to compile to a native binary that requires minimal dependencies, so Rust feels like a more natural fit than C#, especially with Microsoft's desktop UI story being such a dog's breakfast (and even more-so when you account for cross-platform).
Again, in a commercial environment, I could imagine using Electron for that sort of thing because that's what most companies do (but because everything I do nowadays is backend, web, or systems integration, I haven't written a desktop app in a commercial context in 13 years, and I haven't written a command line app in that context since just before the pandemic). However, for my own projects I want to hew as closely as possible to my own principles and ideals and, for them, it'll be a cold day in hell before I ship a desktop or command line app that needs some giant runtime like Electron as a dependency.
Again, the point is that C#, whilst in many ways a great language, doesn't come out as the frontrunner.
> As for TypeScript? Absolutely loathe it.
I just write my TS like I write my C#. They are similar enough, IMO. I ended up writing this as a precursor to our team's move from TS to C#: https://typescript-is-like-csharp.chrlschn.dev/The main things I don't like about TS are the volatile tooling, bad habits from other devs (not declaring types), compromised ORMs, require lots of package hunting, and module system.
Language is fine, tho.
It was pretty impressive work to scale PostgreSQL.