bflat VS zerosharp

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:

Not sure why you would want to use C# without it’s open source framework but here it is: https://github.com/MichalStrehovsky/zerosharp

C# without .NET is like C without glibc. Possible but you'll need another core library. For C# that would be something like Mono or ZeroSharp.

NativeAOT definetely can do bare metal, here's an example of a very basic EFI boot application:

https://github.com/MichalStrehovsky/zerosharp/tree/master/ef...

Here's one example repo that uses that feature if you are interested: https://github.com/MichalStrehovsky/zerosharp

This is false. You can even make UEFI application in C#

check https://github.com/MichalStrehovsky/zerosharp/tree/master/efi-no-runtime

Kind of. There's https://github.com/MichalStrehovsky/zerosharp demonstrating some bare metal capabilities.