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Comment by bcheung | Hacker News Reader

I'm a full time React developer but I would much rather see the CLR than WASM as a universal platform target.

The CLR already supports a larger variety of programming languages from dynamically typed languages like Ruby and Python, to C#, to F# for functional style programming.

It already exists with a rich ecosystem of libraries. The tools to generate CIL opcodes are pretty good and the developer tools with Intellisense are pretty good as well.

It has good packaging support with assemblies. And you can already compile .NET code to WASM using Blazor.

And with .NET already running on Linux, Win, Mac, iOS, Android, and IOT devices, I don't really see targeting WASM adding anything that doesn't already exist.

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Yes but like the parent poster said, all of the CLR features are really to serve one language: C#. All other languages primarily targeting the CLR must be understood in the context of “how would you express this thing in C# and how will a C# client interact with your assembly”.

Thus, WASM will forever be tied to javascript and all other languages will need to deal with questions of “how would I express this in JavaScript”.

C# is the largest language for sure but it was designed for multiple languages from the start. There are things you can do in CIL and other languages that you can't do in C# even. Functional languages and pattern matching can be expressed quite well in .NET which aren't in C# (at least not yet fully).

I think the statement that the CLR ties you to C# is not justified. Can you elaborate why you think this is the case?

Also, WASM is not tied to JavaScript. You can't even compile JavaScript to WASM because it doesn't support the necessary primitives. In fact other languages that are completely different than JavaScript compile to WASM much easier.

WASM is tied to existing JavaScript engines and their constraints. For example, WASM doesn't support more efficient control flow because of the design of V8 (and possibly SpiderMonkey):

http://troubles.md/posts/why-do-we-need-the-relooper-algorit...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19997091

Tied to the engine is orthogonal to tied to the language. You can compile C, C++, and Rust to WebAssembly. But you still can't compile JS to WebAssembly.

Given the large amount of code in JS and the number of JS developers, not being able to support a major general purpose language rules out WASM as a cross platform target in my book.

You can compile a subset. See AssemblyScript. Actually more like a subset of TypeScript.

> statement that the CLR ties you to C# is not justified

it is. F# developers are stuck with the language progress and can't (or don't want to) add big and important features like Type Classes or Higher-kinded Types, until C# adds them first

https://github.com/fsharp/fslang-suggestions/issues/243

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