Avalonia VS Roslyn

WPF is not the best example of open source, as some components are still closed source. Though it only runs on Windows, a closed source operating system, so perhaps that is not so important.

https://github.com/dotnet/wpf/issues/2554

That said, there are cross platform, open source .NET UI frameworks out there, including one that is inspired by WPF:

https://avaloniaui.net/

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)

The C# compiler has an MIT license and is available on GitHub, which is about as FOSS as it gets.

https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn

My understanding is that the .NET team is working toward this with Interceptors: https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn/blob/main/docs/features/int...

.NET is a little smarter about switch code generation these days: https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn/pull/66081

Recently, while creating some experimental C# source code generators (xafero/csharp-generators), I was just concatenating strings together. Like you do, you know, if things have to go very quickly. If you have a simple use case, use a formatted multi-line string or some template library like scriban. But I searched for a way to generate more and more complicated logic easily - like for example, adding raw SQL handler methods to my pre-generated DBSet-like classes for my ADO.NET experiment. You could now say: Use Roslyn and that's really fine if you look everything up in a website like SharpLab, which shows immediately the syntax tree of our C# code.

At runtime, the Case C# expressions are embedded into a function and dynamically compiled into an assembly using the Roslyn C# compiler. Then the function that contains the expression is called (e.g. CaseAvailableFunction.Availablle()). At runtime, the function provides various methods to access stored case values as well as the current input data.