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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

Except that was exactly one of the goals of the CLR, hence Managed C++, followed by C++/CLI.

Microsoft's original plan for CLR was to replace the complete Windows stack with .NET, they just failed to do, because not only they had to deal with technical issues, there were the internal wars from WinDev making sure that would never happen, hence the Longhorn failure, followed by the same ideas reborned as COM on Vista, rebooted as WinRT/UAP/UWP a couple of years later.

Microsoft even had something like LLVM, done on top of the CLR, called Phoenix. It just never came out of MSR into production.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_(compiler_framework)

https://www.infoq.com/news/2008/05/Phoenix-Compiler-Framewor...

Also, GraalVM will happily consume LLVM bitcode.

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Managed C++ and C++/CLI are not C++. They will not help you if you have an existing C++ codebase, or if you want to avoid GC.

Sure they are, they are Visual C++ language extensions.

Standard C++ compiles just fine.

There is no different than using language extensions on GCC, clang or any other C++ compilers.

You are not forced to use GC beyond the interop to other .NET languages.

I have integrated quite a few C++ libraries this way, given that my C++ experience makes it easier than having to deal with P/Invoke attributes and possible linking issues.

My bad, I read about these too quickly. Still, unless you are in the CLI ecosystem, these are not very compelling propositions. WebAssembly is a response to the shortcomings of previous iterations of the universal bytecode idea.

I think the point people are making is that WebAssembly can't be a response to the prior shortcomings of the CLR/JVM because so many of the things being identified as shortcomings aren't (at least not in the latest versions), and so many basic features that you'd want aren't in WebAssembly.

WASM exists mostly for political reasons as far as I can tell: it's something people who work on browsers can "own", vs outsource to other older teams with more historical baggage and different backing corporations. I mean, for WASM to be technically compelling you have to buy the idea that the best way to move the web forward is to enable applets-written-in-C without any useful form of DOM interop or GUI. That seems like a rather implausible claim.

Are you suggesting that browsers should just embed a JVM or CLR? Those are huge runtimes that evolved independently of the design constraints of the web. Java Applets were available in browsers 20 years ago and lost to JavaScript. Why would JVM in the browser do any better now?

Lol. Java was absolutely designed for the web. Why do you think the main language of the web is called JavaScript? Java 1.0 came with the HotJava browser and Netscape 3 had a feature called LiveConnect that linked the JVM and the DOM together.

As for embedding a JVM, sure, why not? Good JVMs are open source these days and HotSpot starts in 50 msec or less. V8 is very comparable, tech wise in terms of its approach. Lots of code out there targets JVM bytecode.

JVM-bytecode isn't ideal as a compilation target for C++, Rust, etc. And that's okay - it was designed for a different purpose.

There are very good technical reasons for WASMs existence. JVM-Bytecode for example is very Java-focused, WASM doesn't need class-files or many bytecodes like invokevirtual. For supporting C++/Rust it doesn't even need GC.

Bringing large applications like PSDFKit, AutoCAD or games into the browser is certainly getting the web forward. Sure, WASM isn't intended for manipulating the DOM. This is still JS's job (at least for the foreseeable future).

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