Hah. Yes, actually I did. I wrote a C#-to-C++ transpiler and a VM wrapper with a concurrent GC. This predated Unity's IL2CPP by about 6 months.

Compile times were a big issue, and the little edges of the language and libraries were problematic since they were built around a JIT. Then it struck me that I don't really care about the JIT, and the reason I liked C# had nothing to do with the GC, and it would be much better to just make a slight variation of C# that was statically compiled and without a GC.

I just followed along all the obvious next steps from there, and here we are 5 years later.

How do you feel about .NET Core's growing support for AOT, and better manual/stack allocation support with Span<T> in ? If you had to start from scratch would you give native C# another try? What do you think is still missing from the language?