One big change for 2026 is a move away from the Mono runtime for Android .NET applications to CoreCLR. The modern .NET platform evolved from the open source Mono project, and even though it now has its own runtime in CoreCLR, it has used the older runtime as part of its WebAssembly (Wasm) and Android implementations.
Wasmer has released Wasmer 7, an upgrade of its WebAssembly runtime that introduces an experimental async API that enables full async support in Python. The update also brings support for dynamic linking to WASIX, broadening the platform's support for Python packages. Introduced January 30, Wasmer 7 introduces an experimental async API that offers first-class support for async functions in Python, unlocking powerful libraries such as SQLAlchemy and other Python packages that previously could not run, Wasmer said.
One of my oldest open-source projects - Bob - has celebrated 15 a couple of months ago. Bob is a suite of implementations of the Scheme programming language in Python, including an interpreter, a compiler and a VM. Back then I was doing some hacking on CPython internals and was very curious about how CPython-like bytecode VMs work; Bob was an experiment to find out, by implementing one from scratch for R5RS Scheme.
Programs adopting approachable concurrency are single-threaded by default, which is ideal for scripts and UI code, and provide greater resilience for asynchronous code that accesses mutable state by running it on the caller's executor thread. When you want to ensure an async method is run on the concurrent thread pool instead of in the caller's context, you can use the @concurrent annotation. InfoQ previously covered approachable concurrency following its announcement at Apple's WWDC 2025, providing additional detail and context.
In GraalJS, a JavaScript language implementation built on GraalVM, GraalVM 25 enables source-phase imports from WebAssembly modules ( import source mod from "./mod.wasm") by default if the js.webassembly option is enabled and the js.source-phase-imports option is not set to false. ECMAScript 25 also is enabled by default. With GraalWasm, an open source WebAssembly runtime, Context.eval now returns a compiled (but not yet instantiated) module object, rather than a module instance.
In addition to expanding the capabilities of raw linear memories, support was added for a new form of storage that is managed by the Wasm runtime automatically. WasmGC is low-level; a compiler targeting Wasm can declare the memory layout of its runtime data structures in terms of struct and array types, plus unboxed tagged integers, whose allocation and lifetime are then handled by Wasm.
