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Comment by legulere | Hacker News Reader

Blazor is (currently) using the mono .net interpreter compiled to WebAssembly. This seems to me more of a proof of concept than something you would really want to use.

With garbage collection support landing in WebAssembly we might see compilation of .net IL to WebAssembly, but that’s still out in the future.

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The really cool thing about Blazor is currently with a couple small changes, you can switch it to a server side "Razor Components" app. The idea behind the server side concept is that it uses Web Sockets to tell the browser what changes to make. All the logic happens on the server side.

There are a lot of pros & cons here to this way. Some pros are a fast initial render & small amount of bytes needing to be sent. Cons are you need internet access & render changes aren't as fast as client side.

This biggest pro I see though is being able to develop a front end app that you can later switch to Blazor/Web Assembly with the client taking over part of the logic when Blazor & Web Assembly are less experimental. For internal apps, or apps where you know the internet/network connection should always be good, this is a great way to go.

We found it good enough to build internal apps. Better than our current JS setup because it’s far more productive.

It’ll make its way into .net core 3.0, so I think it’s more than just a poc.

It’s early of course and not very flexible, if you want to build something it wasn’t meant for, it breaks.

what's the performance penalty of the mono VM?

Performance is fine, but it’s still too big for slow internet. A simple form for turning in signed data and starting an internal service is easily a few MB. Which isn’t a problem for internal solutions that never leave the administrative network, but we’ll keep doing vue and graphql Apollo for our apps that have to function on mobile networks for the time being.

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