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by aquova 807 days ago
> “While obviously C/C++ and Rust came to the ecosystem early on, other languages seemed to slowly put a ‘toe in the water’, first having limited support and then gradually investing more as usage takes off.”

This is the biggest limitation for me. I like WASM fine, but anytime I want to use it I have to turn back to Rust. I like Rust fine, but without support in other languages, it's not necessarily worth diving into.
2 comments
azakai 807 days ago
The good news in that area is that WasmGC (shipping in Chrome and Firefox today) has allowed very good Wasm support to be shipped for many more languages, including Java, Kotlin, Dart, Scheme, OCaml, and more.
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HdS84 807 days ago
What about dotnet? Irc it was even there before rust?
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useerup 807 days ago
The first .NET Blazor "webassembly" was the .NET runtime ported to Webassembly, but where developer code would actually be the same type of IL (Microsoft's Intermediate Labguage) as .NET runs on Windows and Linux.

Unlike those platforms however, the IL was actually interpreted by the ported .NET runtime. Only the runtime was actually running as WASM.

To this day this is still the default, but now you can use a compiler to compile from IL to WASM, and then run full WASM code in the browser. This toolchain is a bit slower on build, but the code will run much faster.

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orra 807 days ago
Just to add to this answer, here's [1] how to do .NET with AOT compilation, without needing Blazor.

[1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/use-net-7-from-any-jav...

Such an app needs to download a megabyte of runtime. This isn't tiny. Yet, for corporate apps I think it's okay? Apps start reasonably quickly, although not instantly, maybe 2 seconds.

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