

Ask HN: What If Windows Phone OS Is Written in Go? - rajeemcariazo

I&#x27;m thinking wildly today. What do you think will  happen if Microsoft decided to scrap all its Windows Phone efforts and decided to build from scratch a Mobile OS in Go?
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CyberFonic
Politics and language wars aside, it could look exactly the same as the
current Windows Phone. The language used to implement an OS has no bearing on
the visual appearance, UX, etc. I wouldn't expect the performance to be much
different either.

BTW, you can write apps in Go on Windows and run them on Windows. Don't know
how different the tooling would be for Windows Phone.

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Avalaxy
And then? Who cares about what language the OS is written in? Customers surely
don't.

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brudgers
Investors would be outraged by the stupidity because Windows Phone runs
Windows.

~~~
CyberFonic
Most investors don't care about the technology. Does it make more money or
not? And I would doubt that changing the programming language would make any
difference to the market perception of the Windows Phone as a product.

Techies who favour Go might as well just buy an Android phone.

~~~
brudgers
As you observe. rewriting Windows Phone in Go would not implicitly make money.
My observation is that rewriting a vast field deployed code base [even one
smaller and less widely dispersed than Windows] in the language of the month
is frequently a bad idea because it introduces regressive bugs.

Beholden to Wall Street since the recent divestments of Gates and Ballmer, a
shift such as that suggested would trigger action by _investors as
shareholders_ in response to the utter management incompetence it suggests.

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ankurdhama
You already answered the question - "They will be thinking wildly" :)

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blawa
While GO is a great language, I doubt it has any significant advantages over
C#. Also, Microsoft is doing very well with the phone dev, its the end
developer who're not writing apps. And they are not-not writing apps because
of PL issues, C# is much more popular than Go, they are not not writing
because they are trendy.

~~~
luuio
you do realize the OS itself is probably not built with C# right?

