gc VS Uno Platform

It may take some time for WasmGC to be usable by .NET. Based on the discussions the first version of WasmGC does not have a good way to handle a few .NET specific scenarios, and said scenarios are "post-post-mvp". [0]

My concern, of course, is that there is not much incentive for those features to be added if .NET is the only platform that needs them... at that point having a form of 'include' (to where a specific GC version can just be cached and loaded by another WASM assembly) would be more useful, despite the pain it would create.

[0] - https://github.com/WebAssembly/gc/issues/77

Yes, that's definitely true: a single GC will not be optimal for everything, or even possible. Atm interior pointers are not supported at all, for example, but they are on the roadmap for later:

https://github.com/WebAssembly/gc/blob/main/proposals/gc/Pos...

What launched now is enough WasmGC to support a big and useful set of languages (Java, Kotlin, Dart, OCaml, Scheme), but a lot more work will be required here!

GC proposal is from 2018: https://github.com/WebAssembly/proposals/issues/16 and there’s code: https://github.com/WebAssembly/gc/blob/master/proposals/gc/O...

Seems like an awefully long time for progress to be made, given all the possibilities it would unlock.

First is the size. Writing a server-side and client-side program is possible with Rust, and the resulting WASM package will be small enough. At the same time, Microsoft Blazor converts C# code to WASM, but the client delivery has to include the reduced .NET runtime, taking several megabytes for a script. The same is true for GoLang, even with an attempt to reduce the runtime delivery in TinyGo WASM. Developers want to work with their favorite languages, whether it is Java, Kotlin, Dart, C#, F#, Swift, Ruby, Python, C, C++, GoLang, or Rust. These languages produce groups of runtimes. For example, JVM and .NET have many common parts, Ruby and Python are dynamically interpreted at runtime, and all mentioned depend on automatic garbage collection. For smaller WASM packages, browser vendors can include extended runtime implementations, for example, by delivering a general garbage collector as part of WASM. Garbage collection support by WASM is currently in progress: WASM GC, .NET WASM Notes.

My understanding is that the main limitation is technical. WASM doens't do GC or the host system calling conventions and cannot interact directly with object from Javascript because of this. However, this is being worked[0] on and will be solved eventually. Even without this the performance overhead of bridging to JS is low enough that WASM frameworks can beat out React.

0: https://github.com/WebAssembly/gc/blob/main/proposals/gc/Ove...

I’ve just watched a video on YouTube from Google I/O 2023 on Flutter for the web. Kevin Moore explains that Flutter can compile to Wasm, but now that GC support has been added to the standard and WasmGC is supported in Chromium and Firefox, I’m quite intrigued.

I have found the main thread about using WebAssembly GC in C#: https://github.com/WebAssembly/gc/issues/77. If I understand it correctly, it is not possible to use the current prototype version of GC in C#.

The .net team has given their notes on it, the concern is more on the memory layout from what I remember. Though it may be possible still. The runtime would likely still ship some gc code, but only a subset for cases not supported by the wasm gc itself and a few more for interfacing with the gc service, which overall should still result on smaller payloads compared to current sizes.

I assume that's one of the parts of the work done at https://github.com/WebAssembly/gc - not happening any soon yet, but it'll eventually be done.

And Uno Platform (https://platform.uno/) is akin to React Native in terms of native controls usage.

also UNO Platform (C#) which is suitable for simple or complex cross platform business applications : https://platform.uno/

Why is this a problem? At face value, it isn't a problem. Taking a step back at a more global level, what does "uComponents" mean to the rest of the world? Many of the .NET developers who heavily use NuGet may have not even heard of Umbraco CMS, let alone a 3rd party plugin for it. What if people from the Uno Platform community are browsing NuGet for some kind of components extension library? You can see, this could get confusing outside the scope of the Umbraco community/ecosystem. On top of this, uComponents was developed against Umbraco v4, with its last release in 2016, now it's there to be lingering on the NuGet repository until the end of time, set in stone.

Not a fan of XAML after trying to get into it, but there is Uno Platform. It wraps native widgets on mobile, just like React Native (which is good for accessibility), and uses C#. https://platform.uno/

My guess is that it's mainly focused on mobile. On Windows, it has no overhead (behaving like a normal WinUI 3 app), on macOS I think it uses Catalyst by default (which was developed by Apple to make more iOS apps available for Mac desktops) and on Linux it draws its own widgets that the devs try imitating the GTK style with.

On Android and iOS, it just uses the native widgets which I think is a better experience so you can see my reasons for guessing it's mobile-first. That may or may not be what you want.

5- Uno

> ...building UIs with the document/element api

When the whole premise is flawed, JSX or not, does it really matter if there is a better or worse way of misusing a technology not meant for UIs?

Leave HTML and JavaScript to Wikipedia and other hypertext document libraries.

Unfortunately, WASM is not there yet, but people are trying: https://platform.uno.

Uno Platform is fully open source, under Apache 2.0 license. You can see the license here https://github.com/unoplatform/uno/blob/master/License.md

Also, .NET 7 brought a lot of stability so I am confident you'll have a better experience. I hope to hear back from you. It would be great to have any feedback at our repo - https://github.com/unoplatform/uno/discussions