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Comment by bob1029 | Hacker News Reader

If you are really struggling, I'd suggest trying out the latest .NET before abandoning all hope.

I was recently able to build a 3d software rasterizer and streaming web service using .NET6 and I did not have to consume a single 3rd party dependency.

Even things like SIMD-optimized projection matrix calculations can be found in the box (System.Numerics).

There is obviously the Microsoft aspect to this equation, but I feel like you should at least try the porridge before throwing it away. The empire has a hell of a Death Star these days.

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Did you need to build a GUI? It feels like Microsoft invents some new Windows UI library every 5 years or so and deprecates the previous one. The last I used .NET, it was WPF but I hear WinUI is the hot thing now.

Yes, I was wondering where they were rasterizing to. Although of course the most long-lived way is to just P/Invoke straight into user32.dll to bring up a window.

(The last time I wrote a 3D rasterizer was in 1996, and I had to type my dependencies in from paper into Borland Turbo C)

You remember that demo where someone made an EXE from C# and made it run on Windows 3.1?

I wish there was some streamlined way (config of VS Code?) of doing that, not as extreme, but building regular Win32 apps without the .NET runtime, but with the C# language. Like how you can still use modern C++ but target just Win32.

That would be I think, an awesome compromise of power. C# is a really great language all on its own, without the .NET standard library.

I'd forgotten about that, do you have a link handy? It might be doable in MSBuild. I might actually have a use case for this as well, after battling problems of self-contained apps.

The "AOT" compiler is basically "run the JIT upfront".

https://www.hanselman.com/blog/net-everywhere-apparently-als...

A bitmap that is then encoded to the client as jpeg or x264 data across the websocket. The hard part is making the pixels get to the human eyeballs. I handwave that away with the browser.

Imagine a very primitive version of stadia.

GUI frameworks are subject to more churn than, I think, any other programming domain.

On the desktop, you have WPF, WinUI, QT, GTK, Swing, JavaFX, Electron, and a dozen more. On the frontend, you have React, Angular, Svelte, Ember, Vue, and probably a thousand more, plus roughly as many CSS toolkits as there are atoms in the universe.

And honestly? None of them are that great. Most of them are perfectly functional, but at some point you hit a limit of their abstractions, and start fighting against the framework, rather than fighting alongside it.

This is probably true of any domain if you go deep enough, but UI development seems significantly more fraught with danger and churn than the backend.

This is because the current UI solutions are windows only and they're trying to create something that works cross-platform.

I've been writing Windows Forms applications for 21 years. It's still officially supported and maintained on the latest .NET. I don't think it will ever die. Microsoft invents new libraries but they deprecate nothing.

The hot new thing its Blazor the WebAssembly framework. They are pushing it everywhere, even inside Web widgets on MAUI.

Then you have MAUI, which is basically the rebranding of Xamarin Forms, but it does required a bit of rewriting, and apparently there are some bugs still. And on the Mac they have taken the shortcut of building on top of Catalyst to reuse iOS Xamarin.

Then you have the WinDev team pushing WinUI 3.0, still behind UWP capabilities and moreso behind WPF.

Currently on .NET your safest bets are Windows Forms, WPF, the 3rd party projects like Avalonia and Uno, or if the use case is possible, Web.

I would wait for MAUI to mature a bit more, consider WinUI a implementation detail of MAUI on Windows, and ignore it for everything else.

Most languages were like that when they were new. Famously Python. It doesn't last.

C# is 22 years old.

C# is old enough to drive.

I don't think any languages are feature-full when they're new. It takes time for the ecosystem to develop.

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