Hacker News Reader

Comment by oropolo | Hacker News Reader

In essence, JetBrains has caught up to where Xamarin was prior to the announcement of Xamarin.Forms: the ability from one solution to have separate iOS and Android UI applications with a business logic library shared between the two, all written in C# or F# (the two languages supported by the Mono compiler). The main difference is that one of the vendors actually supports the language in question (Kotlin) as a first-class citizen.

And going the other way, there's been noise for a couple years that Android apps could be written in Swift, achieving the same effect in reverse.

View on HN

> The main difference is that one of the vendors actually supports the language in question (Kotlin) as a first-class citizen.

How is this different for Xamarin? C# has first class support on Windows.

Windows isn't a mobile platform. They tried 2.5 times and have given up. In mobile it's iOS and Android, and neither Apple nor Google recognize C# as a first-class language. If you can write a compiler that emits code that LLVM can compile to ARM binary with Xcode or package your MSIL with a micro .NET VM on Android, then more power to you but Apple and Google aren't going to help you if you get stuck.

Windows tablets, laptops and 2-1 devices are quite mobile to me.

And an AS/400 was perfectly "mobile" to Arnold S. back in his prime. :-)

Prerty difficult to find a good dash mount, no usb charging, bit bright at night and having to plug in an external gps unit is fairly limiting though.

The car computer already takes care of that.

The context of the article is about iOS & Android apps, so 1st class support on Windows is nice, but not germane.

Xamarin's "first class" support for Windows is Windows Store only though?

no.

While still in Preview, Xamarin.Forms actually supports Linux with Gtk#, Windows with WPF and UWP and Mac with Cocoa (actually Cocoa with C# does work really well).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com