While Microsoft Is Busy Learning Rust, I'm Rebuilding .NET for WASI
Apparently Stephen Toub is busy with Rust now, so I've decided to cover his .NET shift. Okay, that's a tongue in cheek obviously. Toub recently wrote about leading the migration of GitHub Copilot's agent runtime from TypeScript to more than 800,000 lines of production Rust , with AI agents writing most of the code. But the timing made me laugh. One of the engineers most closely associated with…
Stephen Toub, a key figure in modern .NET development, recently led the migration of GitHub Copilot's agent runtime from TypeScript to Rust. Meanwhile, the author of this article is working on rebuilding .NET for WebAssembly (WASI). The author has been developing an independent .NET compiler, CoreLib, and runtime for WASI, aiming to provide native executables without the conventional .NET runtime.
This approach is reminiscent of the AOT (Ahead-Of-Time) concept, which was initially explored in projects between 2008 and 2021. The result is NetWasm, an independent CIL-to-WebAssembly compiler, CoreLib, and runtime. The output includes a runtime and a garbage collector tailored to the program's needs, all compiled for the target system.
The author believes that the future of .NET will benefit from this approach, as it eliminates unnecessary components and allows for more efficient deployment.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
