go

Hasn't Microsoft largely hitched their horse to Go these days, though (not just this project)? They even maintain their own Go compiler: https://github.com/microsoft/go It is a huge company. They can do more than one thing. C#/.NET certainly isn't dead, but I'm not sure they really care if you do use it like they once did. It's there if you find it useful. If not, that's cool too.

https://github.com/microsoft/go/blob/microsoft/main/patches/... Upstream Go tricks Windows into enabling long path support by setting an undocumented flag in the PEB. The Microsoft Go fork can't use undocumented APIs, so this commit removes the hack. There is no documented way to enable long path support from within the process, so this this is a breaking change for the Microsoft Go fork. Note that the Go standard library makes a best effort to support long paths by using the `\\?\` prefix when possible, so this change should only affect long relative paths, which can't be used with the `\\?\`. lol?

"What the heck is Microsoft Go?" > This repository produces a modified version of Go that can be used to build FIPS 140-2 compliant applications. Our goal is to share this implementation with others in the Go community who have the same requirement, and to merge this capability into upstream Go as soon as possible. It is also the default 'golang' package on Azure Linux 3.0. Microsoft Go fork: https://github.com/microsoft/go Issue discussing FIPS implementation: https://github.com/golang/go/issues/69536

What a coincidence, I was just browsing Microsoft's Go fork (for FIPS compatibility, basically replacing Go crypto with OpenSSL and whatever API Windows has, just like there's a Google's fork that uses BoringSSL), and found this patch: https://github.com/microsoft/go/blob/microsoft/main/patches/... Upstream Go tricks Windows into enabling long path support by setting an undocumented flag in the PEB. The Microsoft Go fork can't use undocumented APIs, so this commit removes the hack. So, even if they fork something, they have to strictly follow this guideline and remove undocumented API usage. I wonder if this only applies to Windows APIs though.

If these changes are merged into upstream, then Microsoft may not need their fork: https://github.com/microsoft/go

You would be interested in this if you need the 'crypto' library to work in a FIPS 140-2 compliant way. You can switch on / off this mode by setting the runtime variable GOFIPS=1 before running your Go program [1]. Nice. It looks like the Go community officially has no plans to support FIPS140-2 any time, so I'm glad to see this alternative. [1] https://github.com/microsoft/go/tree/microsoft/main/eng/doc/...

They document exactly that https://github.com/microsoft/go/tree/microsoft/main/eng/doc/...