Avalonia.FuncUI VS CSharpForMarkup

For those interested in .NET languages with alternative compilation targets, Elmish (https://elmish.github.io/elmish/) is pretty unique.

We use F# on the front end (instead of TS), and thanks to the Fable compiler (which transpiles F# to JS, Python, Dart, PHP and Rust), most of the benefits of an Elm-style model in the UI can be ported to all sorts of different outputs languages. The rust target is in beta, but its promising because the WASM bundle size stands to be dramatically lower.

While the default is reactivity library for Elmish is React, you can swap in Avalonia/FuncUI (https://github.com/fsprojects/Avalonia.FuncUI) pretty easily as well.

The code to declare/build the widgets is quite nice. Modifying widgets by hand on certain signals or manually re-wiring all the signals seems a bit outdated to me.

Wonder if something like FuncUI [1] could be built on top of it.

[1] https://github.com/fsprojects/Avalonia.FuncUI

OTOH, if desktop really is the primary focus, and if you can drop the idea of reusable UI code, then Avalonia is a great choice for F# as you can use a Avalonia.FuncUI and/or Elmish.Avalonia.

And one more MVU for you https://github.com/fsprojects/Avalonia.FuncUI

You might want to check out Avalonia.FuncUI, which lets you use F# and the cross-platform Avalonia framework to build desktop applications with an Elm-like architecture: https://github.com/fsprojects/Avalonia.FuncUI#example-using-...

It's a bit of a hit and miss as of today. CLI, back-end and natively compiled libraries (think dll/so/dylib or even .lib/.a - you can statically link NAOT binaries into other "unmanaged" code) work best, GUI - requires more work.

Avalonia[0] and MAUI[1] have known working templates with it, but YMMV.

[0] https://github.com/lixinyang123/AvaloniaAOT / https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia/ / honorable mention https://github.com/VincentH-Net/CSharpForMarkup

[1] https://github.com/dotnet/maui (try out with just true in csproj - it is known to work e.g. on iOS)

Uno Platform can be both XAML or C# Markup if you use https://github.com/VincentH-Net/CSharpForMarkup with it.

And if you use https://github.com/VincentH-Net/CSharpForMarkup with it, you can have an all-around C# approach for both front end and back end.

Maybe some c# markup libraries like this one. But I haven't use that so you'd need to check yourself

You can CSharpForMarkup with WPF, WinUI 3, Uno Platform. with AvaloniaUI and Maui coming and possibly Blazor.

https://github.com/VincentH-Net/CSharpForMarkup

To manage mental mapping of what is being drawn, I keep methods that create widget trees short. My rule of thumb is that whole method has to comfortably fit the screen at once. For each section of the main tree I create a static function that returns a branch of the tree. These functions have descriptive names that help you visualize what element each function builds. If a tree inside a function is long, it is broken down in the same way.

There are some fluent extensions (for Xamarin.Forms and probably future MAUI) that help you build UI in declarative fashion with C#. Same extensions could be created for other frameworks.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/xamarin/c-sharp-markup-for-xa...

https://github.com/VincentH-Net/CSharpForMarkup

For reusable custom widgets that can't be done with a static function, I create new classes with their own widget trees. Try to keep widgets composable and avoid inheritance if possible.

Hot reload is coming in .NET 6, so waiting for rebuild will soon be history.

I have no experience with QML so I can't really comment on that.

If I were to build a windows only desktop app with technology I was moderately familiar with, I'd probably got for WPF + https://github.com/VincentH-Net/CSharpForMarkup Working without XAML makes life so much simpler.