bflat VS GtkSharp

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:

Thanks, but I still have a question. Is that "rubber band selection" on GtkTreeView a new feature that was added to GTK4? Because, I use GTK# (the C# library for GTK) which uses GTK 3.22. I created a simple GtkTreeView, but I cannot do rubber band selection, on the same Linux PC where I recorded that rubber band selection in the OP. I wonder if this is because it is GTK3, or because I had not added the code to enable rubber band selection.

I noticed GtkSharp is on version 3.24, quite mature. I hope MS takes this seriously brings much needed Linux support, as all the dependency components are in place.

There's also the more direct route by using say Gtk directly[1].

[1]: https://github.com/GtkSharp/GtkSharp

Looks like a "blocker" is getting GtkSharp working with .Net6. Unclear from this GitHub issue when such support will be merged into the project's main branch.

For .NET GUI development on Linux, my go-to choice would be GTK#. This is a managed wrapper on GTK+2 or 3. If you have experience on developing GUI application using C and GTK+, you can reuse most of the concepts (and even some of the Glade files) in GTK#.

Your only real choice for GUI development with F#/.NET on Linux is GTK#. (I've gotten feedback on Twitter that this statement may be a bit harsh, will update when I dive a bit deeper into other options).

https://github.com/GtkSharp/GtkSharp is used rather than the mono gtk-sharp-3

mono/gtk-sharp is still stuck on 2.0 I think, but GtkSharp/GtkSharp uses 3.22 and up.

GTK https://github.com/GtkSharp/GtkSharp