Blazor

your point about the multi-platform advantages of keeping the GC portion of the runtime inside of wasm. Funny enough that may turn on its head in the distant future once GC support lands, assuming wasm ends up being a popular compilation target outside of the web. In that case you'd have wasm-managed GC objects on desktop and mobile. >The evidence to my point is a fully functioning garbage collected language runtime compiled seemingly without modification (it's written in ANSI C, after all) for the WebAssembly platform. You can do that now, without additional hurdles and without considering the garbage collection semantics of the browser runtime. That seems very practical to me. Lua is very lightweight. The story changes if you try to compile the .NET, JVM, Go or even V8 runtimes into wasm. All possible, but a hell of a lot more difficult. One case study is Blazor.[1] The FAQ in its own readme states that it's not practical currently due to binary sizes, albeit not for GC-related reasons. But it will be practical. That was the gist of what I was trying to say, that GCed languages (i.e. ones that include their own runtime) are currently not terribly practical relative to the compiled alternatives, most of which are production-ready now. Of course, having seriously evaluated Unreal Engine 4 for web use with its 50MB runtime, I view even Blazor's current 4MB binary size as quite practical, but it depends on the use case. For general web use, 4MB isn't practical. In support of your point, I concede that whether the GC resides in the module or VM is largely immaterial to practicability as a whole. My point was that packaging the runtime with the payload is usually not sensible relative to the alternatives. I regret that I incorrectly generalized my original statement in terms of garbage collection rather than runtime overhead. [0] https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/impractical [1] https://github.com/SteveSanderson/Blazor

fan long before either of us worked at Microsoft] The ASP.NET Weekly Community Standup is a great place to connect both with the team and with the leading members of the developer community. It's at https://live.asp.net/ with Damian Edwards, Scott Hanselman and me. Damian Edwards (https://twitter.com/damianedwards) is the program manager for the ASP.NET team. During the show, I usually share 10ish links to top posts, open source projects, etc. by the community. We feel like the ASP.NET Community is made up of developers both inside and out of Microsoft, so you'll see a mix. The links are usually in the show notes, and we also tweet the links out daily at @aspnet. I'm not going to risk making a list because I don't want to leave anyone off - there are too many for me to even try to pick favorites! Next, check out the "official" Web Dev blog: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/webdev/. We have a general rule that all posts are signed by actual people, not "the ___ team", so you can see who's working directly on specific topics. You'll definitely see a lot of posts by Jeff Fritz (my team mate), who (in addition to program managing several features) does a ton of work to write up release posts, organize content for conferences, etc. I think of David Fowler (https://twitter.com/davidfowl) as the "crazy genius" on the team. He and Damian wrote SignalR, he worked on prototyping some of the very early work that became ASP.NET Core (and .NET Core all up), etc. Check out this video to see what I mean: https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/NDC/NDC-Oslo-2017/BRK06 For front end dev, make sure you follow Mads Kristensen (https://twitter.com/mkristensen) and Steve Sanderson (https://twitter.com/StevenSanderson). Mads is a program manager for web developer tools in Visual Studio, and also writes a ton of open source Visual Studio extensions for web developers (https://github.com/madskristensen) and builds things like http://webdevchecklist.com/. Steve is always pushing the boundaries of front end development, both with things like JavaScriptServices (https://github.com/aspnet/JavaScriptServices, now shipping in the Visual Studio 2017 Angular / React project templates) and more recently with Blazor (https://github.com/SteveSanderson/Blazor - .NET code running in the browser via Web Assembly). You'll also see Glenn Condron (https://twitter.com/condrong) listed on several of the recent Web Dev blog posts. He covers a lot of deep back end tech, including a lot of stuff with ASP.NET Core on Docker. You can see quick (5-10 minute) interviews with most of those people, as well as a lot of other people on the .NET team, on a show that Maria Naggaga (https://twitter.com/ladynaggaga) and I started up recently called Code Conversations (https://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Code-Conversations). These are short, code focused interviews you can watch while your code is compiling and hopefully put to work right away. Finally, please ping me at @jongalloway if I can help connect you with anyone or if you're having trouble finding information, code samples, etc. I'm happy to help!