js-ts-csharp VS Avalonia

The thing is, if you're comfortable with TypeScript, it's really more or less just a small step to C#.

A small repo here: https://github.com/CharlieDigital/js-ts-csharp

And a practical example of a Playwright web scraper in C# and TypeScript: https://github.com/CharlieDigital/playwright-scrape-api

"Too many keywords" is the weirdest objection to a programming language versus actually using the language to build something practical.

[1] https://github.com/CharlieDigital/js-ts-csharp

Modern C# isn't that big of a lift from TypeScript. If you can write TypeScript, you can write C#. Much easier transition than say Go or Rust. See also: https://github.com/CharlieDigital/js-ts-csharp

> ...this project is a nice showcase how versatile C# and .NET is

C# and .NET are highly underrated/underappreciated because of some early flops and the Microsoft branding.

It's converging with TypeScript in the best way possible[0] and has some really great language features that even TS is lacking (really powerful switch expressions, for example).

It seems like the natural option for teams that want to move from TypeScript to a compiled, multi-threaded, statically typed language but it seems that there's a lot of teams that would rather use Go or Rust; neither of which are as easy to step up to from TypeScript, IMO.

[0] https://github.com/CharlieDigital/js-ts-csharp

Should it be C#? I think the transition to C# is the easiest because of how similar TypeScript and C# are at some levels (small repo here showing the similarities: https://github.com/CharlieDigital/js-ts-csharp)

I have a small repo here that shows just how similar the JS, TS, and C# are: https://github.com/CharlieDigital/js-ts-csharp

For me, I use TypeScript and C# almost interchangeably now. Most of the patterns I would implement in C# I can also implement in TypeScript. It's very easy to move between them (exhibit A and exhibit B).

Bonus: TypeScript is soooo similar to C#; completely worth your time to learn it.

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.