CSharpForMarkup VS runtimelab

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.

There was a "green thread" experiment for dotnet a while ago, here is the conclusion: https://github.com/dotnet/runtimelab/issues/2398

Experiment result write-up: https://github.com/dotnet/runtimelab/blob/e69dda51c7d796b812...

TLDR: The green threads experiment was a failure as it found (expected and obvious) issues that the Java applications are now getting to enjoy, joining their Go colleagues, while also requiring breaking changes. It, however, gave inspiration to subsequent re-examination of current async/await implementation and whether it can be improved by moving state machine generation and execution away from IL completely to runtime. It was a massive success as evidenced by preliminary overhead estimations in the results.

Yeah, it kind of is. There are quite a few of experiments that are conducted to see if they show promise in the prototype form and then are taken further for proper integration if they do.

Unfortunately, object stack allocation was not one of them even though DOTNET_JitObjectStackAllocation configuration knob exists today, enabling it makes zero impact as it almost never kicks in. By the end of the experiment[0], it was concluded that before investing effort in this kind of feature becomes profitable given how a lot of C# code is written, there are many other lower hanging fruits.

To contrast this, in continuation to green threads experiment, a runtime handled tasks experiment[1] which moves async state machine handling from IL emitted by Roslyn to special-cased methods and then handling purely in runtime code has been a massive success and is now being worked on to be integrated in one of the future version of .NET (hopefully 10?)

[0] https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/issues/11192

[1] https://github.com/dotnet/runtimelab/blob/feature/async2-exp...

Unlike these folks from dotnet, which tested directly on ASP for real workload

  https://github.com/dotnet/runtimelab/issues/2398?darkschemeovr=1

[1] https://github.com/dotnet/runtimelab/issues/2398

The only way to avoid it is to not build on top of Java or not adding any features on top of Java.

> To give another example with C#, there has been a lot of recent discussion about finding potential alternatives to their async-await concurrency model. They cite the level of effort it takes to maintain the async await style code and the costs that come from this.

I had a very different take-away. They did PoC with virtual threads and decided it's not worth the switch now and async-await that they have is good enough.

https://github.com/dotnet/runtimelab/issues/2398

> Some of the languages it gets compared too aren't even that old yet.

C# is old enough to drink and Scala just had its 20th birthday this week :)

It was tried and the dotnet team decided to drop it: https://github.com/dotnet/runtimelab/issues/2398

Technical details here: https://github.com/dotnet/runtimelab/blob/feature/green-thre...

Just last month .NET ended a green threading experiment, mainly because the overhead it adds to FFI was too high:

https://github.com/dotnet/runtimelab/issues/2398

Rust had green threads until late 2014, and they were removed because of their impact on performance.

Everyone has done the basic research: green threading is a convenient abstraction that comes with certain performance trade offs. It doesn't work for the kind of profile that Rust is trying to target.