Bringing WebAssembly to the .NET Mainstream - Steve Sanderson, Microsoft
Channel: CNCF [Cloud Native Computing Foundation]
Date: 2022-05-19

Bringing WebAssembly to the .NET Mainstream - Steve Sanderson, Microsoft

Many developers still consider WebAssembly to be a leading-edge, niche technology tied to low-level systems programming languages. However, C# and .NET (open-source, cross-platform technologies used by nearly one-third of all professional developers [1]) have run on WebAssembly since 2017. Blazor WebAssembly brought .NET into the browser on open standards, and is now one of the fastest-growing parts of .NET across enterprises, startups, and hobbyists. Next, with WASI we could let you run .NET in even more places, introducing cloud-native tools and techniques to a wider segment of the global developer community. This is a technical talk showing how we bring .NET to WebAssembly. Steve will demonstrate how it runs both interpreted and AOT-compiled, how an IDE debugger can attach, performance tradeoffs, and how a move from Emscripten to WASI SDK lets it run in Wasmtime/Wasmer or higher-level runtimes like wasmCloud. Secondly, you'll hear lessons learned from Blazor as an open-source project - challenges and misconceptions faced bringing WebAssembly beyond early adopters. [1] StackOverflow survey 2021