Cross compilation, package manager and associated infrastructure, async io (epoll, io_uring etc), platform support, runtime requirements, FFI support, language server, etc.

Are a majority of these things available with first party (or best in class) integrated tooling that are trivial to set up on all big three desktop platforms?

For instance, can I compile an F# lib to an iOS framework, ideally with automatically generated bindings for C, C++ or Objective C? Can I use private repo (ie github) urls with automatic overrides while pulling deps?

Generally, the answer to these questions for – let’s call it ”niche” asterisk – languages, are ”there is a GitHub project with 15 stars last updated 3 years ago that maybe solves that problem”.

There are tons of amazing languages (or at the very least, underappreciated language features) that didn’t ”make it” because of these boring reasons.

My entire point is that the older and grumpier I get, the less the language itself matters. Sure, I hate it when my favorite elegant feature is missing, but at the end of the day it’s easy to work around. IMO the navel gazing and bikeshedding around languages is vastly overhyped in software engineering.