Massive Update To Retyped

blog.bridge.net

10 points·andrey_ch··4 comments

(Retyped is part of the Bridge.NET C# -> JS/TypeScript converter)

It’s super exciting too see Bridge maintaining its place in a world that includes both C# -> WebAsm and mature TypeScript ecosystems.

I’d started to wonder if Bridge still had a role to play now that those two ecosystems are maturing, but I think the marshalling cost between WebAsm and JS/Dom is likely to discourage full WebAsm implementations in many cases, and if it does the ability to do seamless code sharing between frontend TypeScript and backend C# is pretty killer.

Have you seen 'https://github.com/aspnet/blazor'? Looks (very) promising. I haven't used Retyped myself, but from the looks of it Blazor does more or less the same thing but maybe better?

Blazor is an example of C# -> WebAssembly tech, which is related to but different from ReTyped’s C# -> TypeScript tech. It’s easy to take a quick look and conclude compiling to WebAssembly must be better than compiling to TypeScript, but it’s far from clear that’s always the case at this point. WebAssembly runs faster than vanilla JS when you are inside the WebAssembly stack but there are costs to cross back and forth between WebAssembly and the Dom/vanilla JS and there are also non-trivial memory management issues with WebAssembly. The memory management situation will hopefully be fixed a few browser versions from now. It’s less clear whether there is a good fix for the WebAsm <-> JS marshalling cost coming in the near future.

Take a look at the following thread about WASM performance, might be interesting to you: https://www.reddit.com/r/csharp/comments/8gjx3v/a_small_perf...

Benchmark results for Bridge.NET are provided here: https://github.com/stefan-schweiger/dotWasmBenchmark

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