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Comment by indentit | Hacker News Reader

This is super exciting for me, as a C# developer. I'm fed up of needing (to learn how) to compile C++ projects for each platform so that I can reference them from .NET Core. The idea of just compiling them once for WebAssembly/WASI and only needing to ship one copy of each binary dependency is quite freeing and makes cross plat functionality easier.

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You can compile C++ directly to MSIL if you want...

Ooh, instructions as to how would be super, please :)

is it somehow related to "mixed mode assemblies"[1]?

[1]: https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr/issues/18013

Visual studio compiler option "/clr": https://www.visualcplusdotnet.com/visualcplusdotnet1.html

There's a bunch of language extensions which let you access C# heap, string types etc from C++. You may want to define a "shim" layer to do the translation, but the bulk of your existing C++ can just compile straight across.

You're in luck- MS released a WASM GUI kit- Blazor

I think this is about c++-in-wasm-in-C# rather than c#-in-wasm. It's an (arguably) better way of doing FFI without having to worry about compiling the C++ dependency.

Presumably you have to compile the C++ once to wasm though?

Yeah you would, though having a common compile to target would hopefully make it easier to find pre compiled wasm binaries.

Right, some libraries are already getting official and semi-official wasm targets for the Node JS ecosystem. It would be interesting to "borrow" an existing wasm binary from npm and simply rehost it on the .NET CLR or JVM.

Absolutely... I have a suspicion that Node may actually expand its' presence as a defacto runtime for wasm outside the browser.

Not to mention, cross platform (think x86, arm AND linux, mac, windows) from a single compile target.

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