[chubot]

Hm very interesting! So what it sounds like is that CLR started out like a JVM-like VM, but now they're adding a WASM-like VM to it :)

That is, WASM is a much more natural target for C++/Rust than anything higher level. It can also express unsafe code when you consider the issues brought up in the paper, i.e. that it's unaware of heap integrity. Conversely, the JVM/CLR was traditionally better for Java/C# like languages and you couldn't run C/C++ naturally.

This makes sense as I've heard some of the more recent C# features are to recover performance, like value types, slicing, etc.

[pjmlp]

You got it wrong, CLR supports C++ since version 1.0, released in 2002, including the concept of safe and unsafe code.

It is WebAssembly that tends to be "sold" as if it was the first of its kind.

In fact even the CLR wasn't the first one, there were other bytecode formats for languages, like EM from Amsterdam Compiler Toolkit, IBM and Unisys mainframes/micros.

And around 2003, there was a Swedish startup trying to push a mobile OS that used a VM capable of J2ME, C and C++, the name I cannot longer remember, just some Sony-Ericson models used to have it.