In 2018, I invented a programming language, in a bar, as a joke. That language is Rockstar, an esoteric language based on the lyrics to rock music.

Rockstar was never supposed to be more than a joke spec... but then somebody implemented it, and before long the joke had turned into a project: a living spec, an online interpreter built in JavaScript, a test suite, and a small but enthusiastic community of Rockstar developers who kept requesting features and suggesting ideas.

Then in 2023, .NET announced support for ahead-of-time compilation. For the first time, apps written in C# could be compiled to native binaries for Linux, macOS and Windows - and with .NET web assembly support, you could run the same code in a browser... which meant it was time to do the big rewrite. Rockstar 2.0: Powered by .NET

Rockstar is first and foremost a comedy project, but this isn't a comedy talk: it's a deep dive into the engineering challenges of building a grammar and syntax for an esoteric programming language, a look at the state of the art in .NET tooling and native compilation, and a showcase for the amazing things that you can do in a modern web browser using .NET and web assembly.