C# compiler not for .NET?

Off-Topic
1

Does anybody know a C# compiler which does produce something different than .NET-bytecode?

Greetings
Peter

2

I know the Unity engine use C# without .NET.
Not that it’s available for Haiku though…

3

Thanks for the info. I will have a look at Unity. Unfortunately it’s proprietaty afaik.

Greetings
Peter

4

Not that I’m aware of. C# has been designed for .NET and although it’s a great language, it would not have much sense without it.
There were at least two attempts to generate native executables from c#.NET one is SharpLang and it’s successor coreRT but both appear to be abandoned.
NativeAOT seams dead as well.
But all require .NET Framework or Core.

5

I have not seen any reference to C# without .NET, on the contrary on their site they claim to support .NET 4.6 for scripting and a backend which translates IL to native code. But it seems to require .NET anyway. Could you provide some links about it?

6

More about this. C# memory model is fully managed by the CLR. It is possible to use unsafe structures by marshalling native code. I doubt there is an easy way to produce native code without significantly changing the underlying architecture unless you transpile it to another similar language, maybe.

7

Can you tell me more of C#'s memory model? Or post a link about it?

Greetings
Peter

8

I think it was this post but it was a few years ago: On DOTS: C++ & C# | Unity Blog

1 Like
9

Godot engine use mono and Godot are ported to haiku, but mono dont.

10

Unity can transpile C# to C++. This gives less overhead on the runtime.

There is a dot net framework platform called “dotNet anywhere”. It was used in an early version of Blazor. It is easy to port. I have it run in on PSP for example. But the compiler is an issue, there is no good small C# compiler, so you need the framework to make a port properly viable with a compiler.

2 Likes
11

Google is your friend but there are two old good articles on MSDN: The C# Memory Model in Theory and Practice part 1 and part 2

1 Like
12

It’s an interesting article! Thanks for sharing it.

2 Likes
13

That sounds like what early Android developers did using the OpenJava compiler with a custom system-specific runtime. C# would be a better environment without the dotnet dependencies. Even a 68000 based Amiga can run Java once you dump Classpath and do a custom runtime engine.

2 Likes
14

Godot also supports C# syntax while output is compiled executable and not the byte code compiled executable manifest (IKR). Godot is a portable game development IDE that also supports a fairly decent set of interfaces with the host OS (like open file dialogs; etc.) and is about 100MB.

Beef (Beeflang) uses the LLVM toolchain, produces binary executables while using syntax very similar to C# and has its own GUI IDE. I always thought C# should have had a binary compiler myself thus began watching Beef.

1 Like
15

There is ongoing work porting C#/.Net to Haiku, which is coming along quite nicely.

4 Likes
16

Could you provide more details on this? Is there a GitHub repository?

1 Like
17
2 Likes
18
19

The replies by @jessicah, @Nexus-6 and @SamuraiCrow should be moved to this thread imho:

https://discuss.haiku-os.org/t/haiku-net/12399/6

Just for better reading.

Greetings
Peter

20

Possibly. I will point you to the PSP stuff I did though. It all words on PSP, and the native code is compiled in to a single EXE because PSP does not like loading external libs apparently. I started to add a PSP specific namespace for PSP wrappers, so it is possible to do whatever is needed really.

C# also would not be very useful without the System namespace, because it is where most of the basic stuff is defined.