@Novox:
Precisely.
That, and I suspect that the Core desktop and application (Office) teams also put their collective feet down and insisted that the future platform not sacrifice native level performance
There's really so much that could be done to improve managed performance. Eliminating some of the thunking overhead by re-engineering the native compilers to be more managed friendly. Moving operations that would require native/managed interop into C#/VB. The biggest optimization that was never done was to AOT/NGEN managed code and add it to the cache using an optimizing compiler. Mono has done this for mobile platforms with LLVM, not microsoft. I really don't understand what the benefit is of running the JIT on all code each time it's run.. it slows performance and disallows serious optimiztion.
There's also the issue of a very poor interop experience with C and C++ code from managed code. PInvoke worked for C code but required transliteration of anything in the header files, but never for C++, and that put most C++ library access out of reach for managed code. No effort has really been put forward to solving these issues, or even admitting that they exist.
In any case, it's really a lost opportunity to push what is really a better platform towards covering more of the development stack, at least down into large complex applications, scientific work, or games. Instead the core and app teams decided to fix the module and platform issues with C++ and move forward.
posted by bcooley