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Comment by GordonS | Hacker News Reader

> I had high hopes for it become the best story for crossplatform development, it still feels like the crossplatform is held by ductape.

Sorry to be pedantic, but it's cross-platform GUI that still doesn't have a good, officially supported story.

For non-GUI apps, cross-platform works very well! I've deployed a range of apps to production across Windows, Linux (both x64 and ARM), and Docker on Linux too (also both x64 and ARM) with great success.

I'd like to see an officially supported build for BSD, but that's about my only cross-platform want.

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I think it is looking more and more like the established, de facto cross-platform GUI is a web page, embedded into some framework or not. And this is the general wind direction, not just on .NET platform alone.

People say cruft but sometimes I wonder how much more cruft it really is when you use the system browser rather than an embedded web browser. Usually many shared resources for it are already loaded into RAM.

If the end result is something like MAUI, I much rather just use a web page.

I just saw in the dotnet-labs project they've been building FreeBSD support.

https://github.com/dotnet/runtimelab/tree/feature/FreeBSD

> cross-platform GUI that still doesn't have a good, officially supported story

Yeah, but in the meantime there’re decent unofficial options. Once I compiled NanoVG into a DLL, consumed with C#, and implemented rich GUI on top of that. Worked pretty good overall. Eventually I’ve patched NanoVG for optimal font quality on low resolution touch screen of my target Linux device: https://github.com/Const-me/nanovg

Interesting, I haven't come across NanoVG before!

NanoVG is a 2D rendering library built directly on top of OpenGL or GLES.

Modern rich GUI needs much more than a renderer, but amount and development cost of that “much more” varies depending on GUI complexity. The device I developed is rather simple: low resolution screen, touch is the only input, English localization only, that’s how I was able to deliver in reasonable time.

For more complicated GUI I’d look for different technologies. Maybe QT, despite the high price.

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