WebAssembly: The Definitive Guide

Chapter 13. WebAssembly and .NET

I think foosball¹ is a combination of soccer and shish kabobs.

Mitch Hedberg

Throughout my career I have had a respectfully indifferent relationship with .NET. I have nothing against it; I just have almost never needed it and have spent little time working on anything Windows-specific, which for many years it was.

Back in the early 2000s, I did help initiate a .NET-based project with some coworkers to visualize scenarios simulating attacks on buildings. The idea was that by using real physics models of explosions, we could marry visualization with possible outcomes based upon various protective measures. Security planners could consider different locations for physical barriers and run tests for their facilities involving explosives-laden vehicles. If they could only get so close, what kind of an impact on the building or people standing just inside the entrance might they have?² Windows was the target platform and clearly we needed some computational speed, so we chose a Managed C++ basis for the core libraries and C# for the application. I was not on the project long, but it was successful enough in the end.

Other than that, I have done what I have needed to do with Java, C++, JavaScript, Rust, Python, and other languages and environments. I know a lot of people who love .NET and the tools that surround it, but it has just never mattered much to my career.

That being said, I have always been intrigued by initiatives like Mono, so I keep somewhat ...