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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

> With WASM, you can just import the WASM module for usage into your language, as long as it supports WASM, regardless of original source. Its a portable format and runtime. That is the key difference than VMs of the past to me at least.

Welcome to 2001, .NET CLR.

Welcome to 1988, IBM AS/400 and TIMI.

Welcome to 1980, Amsterdam Compiler Toolkit.

Welcome to ....

The thing WASM has getting for itself is marketing and young generations completly cluessles of the history of bytecode environments since Burroughs Large Systems was introduced in 1961.

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Which is acknowledged clearly, I know there are other approaches, and I even said the idea of WASM isn't new.

Its key feature is less friction. WASM is well specified relative to other options, and doesn't rely on one language to be feature compliant, or have any one language in mind for its targeting.

CLR is naturally really tied to C# / F#. The JVM is a bit better in this regard (Kotlin, Java, Clojure, Scala, and I think Julia all leverage this) because it has a better specification for doing this.

I think WASM excels because its specification is much easier to digest and implement for. Writing WASM modules by hand isn't too terribly bad either (its a LISP even!).

WASM also has good marketing and a good place to test it. Every evergreen browser right now can run WASM code. That makes it infinitely easier to test WASM implementations. As WASI becomes more mature, it will also make it easier to develop interop as well.

I think centrally its just the right combination of good specification, ease of implementation relative to the others, and good marketing.

Julia isnt a JVM language. It’s on LLVM.

my apologies! I'd edit it if HN would let me. I was mistaken

well, that, and performance

and mindshare

Which wasm runtime beats the CLR?

Which wasm runtime has more deployments in production than the CLR since 2001?

nobody is deploying clr applications anywhere where wasm applies

The browser? Sure.

can you point me to any meaningful use of the clr in the browser? i'm not aware of any

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