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Comment by afdbcreid

14 hours ago

This is far from trivial. Consider the WasmGC proposal, which had a somewhat similar goal.

Then C# came and said "we can't use it, we have different needs". So did Go.

> Then C# came and said

It's worse than that. The WASM GC standards team was warned in advance that the proposal wouldn't work for .NET, and they moved forward with it anyway:

https://github.com/WebAssembly/gc/issues/77

They were also warned about Go (though I'm not sure if they ever actually consulted with golang devs):

https://github.com/WebAssembly/gc/issues/36

More links:

https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/issues/94420

https://github.com/golang/go/issues/63904

  • No interior pointers, no embedded arrays, and only a subset of Java definitely seems like an odd target. I would have expected at least two different full languages with acceptable porting overhead to be the MVP.

    • I believe the MVP was chosen specifically to have the same features as JavaScript, so that browser engines can implement it without major changes. So not really an odd target.