Not sure about that, I suppose it depends on the targets each .NET version support. For example, .NET 8 will drop RHEL 7 and only RHEL 8 and later.
And to play devil’s advocate: this won’t work for all existing .NET applications. If you use reflection (which is AOT unfriendly), chances are that you will have to rework a ton of stuff in order to get to a point where NativeAOT works. There’s a middle solution though, called ReadyToRun, which has some advantages compared to running fully with the JIT compiler.
Thank you for the link, so --self-contained will results in “a folder that has our exe and everything that is required to run it (…) a little over 200 files” while /p:PublishSingleFile=true will result in a 70MB file for a simple hello world. This kind of confirms my cheap satire :D it is nice this is an option now but the mess and size is crazy. Statically built Qt programs for Windows, with a GUI, are usually around 10MB for a simple app.
I’m pretty sure that 70MB is including the entire .NET standard library, which is massive. Enabling NativeAOT or trimming reduces the size down to a few MB
> Does it effectively output a single binary?
Yes, that’s one of the points of NativeAOT, a self-contained single binary, exactly as Go does it.
> Does it create some kind of clusterf*k and awkward packaging formats like other MS solutions such as UWP?
No, you can create .exe files.
> Will it actually be deployable to a random fresh install of Debian 12 or Windows 10?
Yes, NativeAOT supports Windows, Linux and MacOS, x64 and Arm64.
> What about compatibility with older systems?
Not sure about that, I suppose it depends on the targets each .NET version support. For example, .NET 8 will drop RHEL 7 and only RHEL 8 and later.
And to play devil’s advocate: this won’t work for all existing .NET applications. If you use reflection (which is AOT unfriendly), chances are that you will have to rework a ton of stuff in order to get to a point where NativeAOT works. There’s a middle solution though, called ReadyToRun, which has some advantages compared to running fully with the JIT compiler.
Thank you for the link, so
--self-containedwill results in “a folder that has our exe and everything that is required to run it (…) a little over 200 files” while/p:PublishSingleFile=truewill result in a 70MB file for a simple hello world. This kind of confirms my cheap satire :D it is nice this is an option now but the mess and size is crazy. Statically built Qt programs for Windows, with a GUI, are usually around 10MB for a simple app.I’m pretty sure that 70MB is including the entire .NET standard library, which is massive. Enabling NativeAOT or trimming reduces the size down to a few MB
My bad, the link I sent was not about NativeAOT, just bundling all the dependencies together (also, it’s 4 years old). After a quick search, here’s a recent SO question that mentions that you can build .exe files
As for the filesize… please recheck the post under which we are commenting. :D