bflat VS Avalonia

The sibling pretty much sums it up. But if you want more detail, read on:

Generally, there are three publishing options that each make sense depending on scenario:

JIT + host runtime: by definition portable, includes slim launcher executable for convenience, the platform for which can be specified with e.g. -r osx-arm64[0].

JIT + self-contained runtime: this includes IL assemblies and runtime together, either within a single file or otherwise (so it looks like AOT, just one bin/exe). These requires specifying RID, like in the previous option.

AOT: statically linked native binary, cross-OS compilation is not supported officially[1] because macOS is painful in general, and Windows<->Linux/FreeBSD is a configuration nightmare - IL AOT Compiler depends on Clang or MSVC and a native linker so it is subject to restrictions of those as a start. But it can be done and there are alternate, more focused toolchains, that offer it, like Bflat[1].

If you just want a hello world AOT application, then the shortest path to that is `dotnet new console --aot && dotnet publish -o {folder}`.

[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/rid-catalog

[1] https://github.com/bflattened/bflat (can also build UEFI binaries, lol)

See here

See B flat

I've been wondering how to integrate modern .NET Core into a custom build system (buck2) and was wondering similar things. There's this project I think is cool called bflat[1] that basically makes the C# compiler more like the Go compiler in the sense it's a one-shot single-use tool that can cross compile binaries natively. It's done by one of the people on the .NET Runtime team as a side project, but quite neat.

I think in practice you're supposed to compile whole .dll's or assemblies all at once, which acts as the unit of compilation; I don't think the csharp compiler generates native object-files-for-every-.cs, the kind of approach you'd expect from javac or g++. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong though! I'd like to learn more about this.

[1] https://github.com/bflattened/bflat

You can compile without a GC using https://github.com/bflattened/bflat

nice. have you tried compile it using https://github.com/bflattened/bflat to have native executable? as long as you don't have PackgeReference it can be compiled using bflat instead of full dotnet

The creator actually addresses this issue:

You might also want to look at AvaloniaUI[0] for a cross platform .NET GUI library. It is similar to WPF but much nicer to work with.

[0] https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia

Production user here. There's no money gotchas. They're above reproach. In fact, I've received considerable free support from their devs on GitHub Issues [1].

The Avalonia business model is based on selling XPF, which runs WPF (Windows-only) apps on other platforms. That's very interesting to big corps with existing codebases.

See my comment [2]

[1] https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia/issues

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39246988#39249128

Yes, but the portable GUI frameworks by Microsoft themselves are generally not very good, and they tend to be abandoned after a couple of years.

Avalonia is developed outside of the Microsoft corporate madness and seems to be slowly becoming the defacto cross-platform framework because it is expected to last a bit longer than a manager's attention span: https://avaloniaui.net/

Not my comment, but relevant here "The problem with compiling Skia to WASM is you'll lose any benefits of hardware graphics acceleration on the device."

(From https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia/discussions/6831#disc... )

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)

For desktop, Avalonia, hands down.

https://avaloniaui.net/

Open source, powered by Skia, backed by JetBrains, and quite battle-tested at this point for small to medium-sized apps. In theory perfectly capable for enterprise as well, since it's basically a spiritual successor to WPF, which has been an industry standard for about 15 years.

They're diving into mobile and WASM well, but that's more of a recent effort and I haven't tested that yet.