fslang-design VS Avalonia

The C# compiler got a ton of new smarts around reference type nullability and almost all of the BCL (.NET standard library) got annotated for it. I don't know when F# will finally pick up all the new compile-time smarts for Nullable Reference Types, but it has been proposed and prototyped, at least [1].

[1] https://github.com/fsharp/fslang-design/blob/main/RFCs/FS-10...

Note: For some reason I cant submit the Url with the specific section of the Drawbacks section, but it is here https://github.com/fsharp/fslang-design/blob/main/FSharp-7.0...

Does type provider still only support literal strings for definition, right? Supporting records could make it feasible to create something really good as just a side project. I remember suggestions to allow taking record/types but can't find the gh issue or related. Found the rfc. Seems abandoned. It could be a game changer. :(

But, when I try this example from the RFC, I get an "expected option but here has type voption" error.

Add insert/remove/update functions for collections, also Keys/Values for Map

This is https://github.com/fsharp/fslang-design/blob/main/RFCs/FS-1079-union-properties-visible.md

Someone writes an RFC about the approved-in-principle suggestion with more details and opens a pull request to https://github.com/fsharp/fslang-design.

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.