> 3rd party stepping in for Microsoft doesn't count in this discussion.
This completely misses the point of having rich ecosystem nor has any relevance whatsoever from practical standpoint for organizations that have competent leadership.
For all intents and purposes, this would completely disqualify Clojure and Scala themselves since they don’t come from Oracle, and Kotlin if Google/JetBrains don’t count either.
You can’t be serious.
The crybegginng attitude that expects everything to come from first party is extremely damaging to .NET ecosystem because it hinders evolution and innovation, and further expansion of it. Luckily it’s slowly going away but your reply is a good demonstration why it is bad.
Even the current state is too first-party leaning - too many features that have no business being in extension packages let alone CoreLib (e.g. “please fix obsolete System.Drawing on Linux because our legal is incompetent enough to not allow SkiaSharp”)
> VB and C++/CLI
C++/CLI only works on Windows. In no uncertain terms, it is deprecated and effectively dead. You must not write new code with it and existing code must be ported to C# if possible. VB.NET is supported but does not receive new features.
The only possible way for you to compare this to F# is to completely ignore all devblog posts and releases concerning its continuing development. If you did read them, you would also know about the high-effort changes it adopts to stay up to date with the rest of the ecosystem when it introduces new way of doing something. In which case, it is reasonable to ask where do you even pull these assumption from then?