Experimental .NET support for WASI
published on 2023/12/05
We expect WASI to become a standard set of WIT types that provide access to low-level functionality (like getting the time and reading a file). These low-level types effectively form a “Wasm standard library” across programming languages and operating systems. We’re never had standard and shared functionality that Rust devs and .NET devs, for example, could both use. There isn’t any widely-deployed historical precedent of native code that exposed APIs with OO-ish shape (like interfaces) that could be used across programming languages and operating systems.
.NET 8 includes a new workload called wasi-experimental. It builds on top of the Wasm functionality used by Blazor, extending it to run in wasmtime and invoke WASI interfaces. It is far from done, but already enables useful functionality.