"Yep, with a lot of work, that few percent performance overhead C# currently has over C++ could have been almost completely removed. They chose to improve other areas that they considered more important."
@niall I understand where you're coming from, and trust me we're on the same side as far as preferring the 3-10% loss in performance vs. native. Unfortunately there's quite a bit of native code out there, and actually native performance and native interoperability does really matter.
Imagine if you were an Office programmer with 2-3 million lines of C/C++ code and you were told that over the next 3 years the team would be moving exclusively to C#. Would that make sense? If you understand why it doesn't, you'll understand where .NET went wrong during Vista and the continuing problems with where it is now.
posted by bcooley