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Comment by ccvannorman | Hacker News Reader

I use Unity3D to develop for multiple platforms and can't recommend it enough -- it is a 3D game engine so it may be too heavy for some applications, but it can do anything you want it to. Everything is written in C#/.net on your end, Unity cross-compiles to other platforms.

Unfortunately, the built-in IDE for Unity is MonoDevelop, which has all the problems Xamarin does, You don't have to use Mono though, you can use any editor.

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>Unfortunately, the built-in IDE for Unity is MonoDevelop, which has all the problems Xamarin does, You don't have to use Mono though, you can use any editor.

In fact, Visual Studio has first-class support for Unity now, since MS bought the company that made UnityVS and released it as a free VS extension.

I really don't think I could recommend using Unity for a non-game app, though, at least in most cases. It would be a subpar experience for both the developer and the user.

How useful is it to develop non-gaming applications (including 2D UIs)? And how much overheads it results in in terms of application performance and size? Thanks.

Not very: it fundamentally assumes you're making a game, so it draws 3D scenes and uses a continuous update loop, which taxes the battery on mobile devices. The UI tools are also just finicky enough to make non-game app development a pain.

In addition, it does have a little size overhead - the smallest possible build on iOS (a blank screen) is 12 MB with all the optimizations on, and double that if you need to invoke System functions or libraries that need them.

Have you actually seen a performance comparison when idle? I ask because I have been curious about trying to build a full application inside Unity.

Update() on Unity doesn't strike me as being all that different than a normal GUI app's message loop.

I don't suppose you have done any work with unity and f# have you? I'd be interested to hear any war-stories in that context.

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