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Comment by neonsunset | Hacker News Reader

Thank you. It is indeed true that .NET has some gaps in its SIMD API, which might require either writing a specific routine in C and pinvoking it or implementing the algorithm differently.

Were there any other factors that contributed to the decision?

FWIW I forwarded the issue the discussion links to dotnetevolution discord server.

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Yes. We waited long for AOT compilation to become mature, to remove the need for the user to install the .Net framework. But two years ago when we decided to switch, we still couldn't just get the AOT compilation of our codebase to work without changes (perhaps it was somehow possible, but the available documentation was not very verbose about this). Also, there is still a performance gap. Of course, this doesn't matter for most of the applications, where the completeness and consistency of the framework, and the number of programmers fluent in that language might matter more. But for a search server, we needed to carve out every inch of performance we could get. And other benchmarks seemed to echo our experience: https://programming-language-benchmarks.vercel.app/rust-vs-c...

That specific suite is...not the best. https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/... is more focused on optimized implementations and showcases where the performance of .NET places given submissions someone cared to spend some time optimizing.

It is true that 2 years ago NAOT was in its infancy, it has improved substantially since then. Self-contained trimmed binaries already worked back then however.

I guess it is more about unfortunate timing than anything - even the compiler itself moves fast and in some areas the difference in codegen quality is very significant between 7, 8 and 9.

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