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Comment by untog | Hacker News Reader

Imagine writing code like this and having it build to native apps on both platforms:

I think Xamarin are going to be a really interesting company to watch for this stuff. Right now they have MonoTouch and MonoDroid as entirely separate products, allowing you to make apps using C#. But you can already reference libraries across both, and just do the UI plumbing separately, and if they're smart they will work very hard on what the author is describing.

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I agree. Xamarin is closer than anybody else to a viable cross platform solution. They're in just the right place now to start eliminating some of the worst pain points in mobile.

Appcelerator ought to be as well (with the added bonus of using JS, far better known than C#), but their platform isn't on the same level. Yet?

Haven't tried it myself but the reviews on the web seem to be almost universally bad whereas most Monotouch users seem to be pretty happy. I think for larger code bases C# has some important advantages over JS.

Absolutely. I used Appcelerator a long time ago and it was awful- they've actually made a ton of progress since then, but they don't make fully native apps- there's a JS engine in the middle that parses the code. So it's always going to be a little slower than native- but probably acceptable for a ton of apps.

I've been doing this for a long time now, probably for the 8-10 months, and I can safely say its awesome. Xamarin is awesome.

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