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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

Are you sure? https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/deploying/nati...

"Since there's no standardized way to obtain native macOS SDK for use on Windows/Linux, or Windows SDK for use on Linux/macOS, or a Linux SDK for use on Windows/macOS, Native AOT does not support cross-OS compilation. Cross-OS compilation with Native AOT requires some form of emulation, like a virtual machine or Windows WSL."

Now, you don't have to actually use AOT, the other deployment options are actually much easier to cross-build, but true cross build AOT is still not supported.

(this comment is correct: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43388962 ; runtime-dependent and self-contained are fine)

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    > Native AOT does not support cross-OS compilation

    > ...runtime-dependent and self-contained are fine

This certainly reads like you moved the goal posts and recognized it.

Native AOT compilation is definitely not the same as self-contained package. With that logic, every Docker container could be considered AOT compiled static executable.

An image or a container could be, yes. It isn't, because Docker stuff is mostly distributed as Dockerfiles and docker-compose files, and those cause your system to download and install stuff, and that part is not like self-contained package.

The original question did ask about creating executables like Go, which means a single file you can run as is, so it was fair to mention AOT. For servers etc you usually don't want the AOT version, so then it doesn't matter which platform you develop on, but it's not always just like Go when you want to ship little applications.

The context of the thread is HTTP/3 servers; would it not make sense to take the comment in that context? Original article mentions that browsers (the client side) already supports HTTP/3 with the application server ecosystem being the missing piece.

More that there are at least three different ways to deploy things in dotnet, and only AOT is directly equivalent to Go executables. I like dotnet and use it at work but this is a nuisance limitation for us.

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