I've been out of the windows development game for a long time, so I haven't used C# since it strictly required a VM... what's pre-compiled C# development like nowadays? Are there major caveats? If you can emit plain old binaries in C# with no runtime dependencies, that would make it a truly compelling language IMO.
And as another question, what's the cross-platform (mainly Linux) support like in AOT-compiled C#? If it's just as good as in Windows and emits plain executables, I would probably consider it the best place to start for any new project. (Something tells me it's not...)
C# supports AOT since forever, NGEN was present in .NET 1.0. Not many people used it, because it requires signing binaries and only supports dynamic linking, with a performance profile towards fast startup.
On Microsoft side the Singularity and Midori experiments used AOT.
They influenced the AOT toolchains for Windows 8 store apps with MDIL (Singularity/Bartok), and Windows 10 store apps with .NET Native (Midori/Project N).
Now there is Native AOT, which supports CLI and native libraries,.NET 8 extends that to EF and ASP.NET frameworks. For GUI applications, maybe only fully on .NET 9.
Mono AOT has had support for ages, being used on iOS, Android, and Blazor.
Finally there is IL2CPP and Burst compiler from Unity.
In 8, NativeAOT also supports iOS (and even Android reportedly?) for, I assume, MAUI target to do away with Mono. Documentation on this definitely needs work, and there are projects that made it working with WPF, Windows Forms and Avalonia back in .NET 7. Arguably, none of those were particularly user-friendly but generated COM interop project for 8 was done specifically to improve this on Windows as well.
I've been out of the windows development game for a long time, so I haven't used C# since it strictly required a VM... what's pre-compiled C# development like nowadays? Are there major caveats? If you can emit plain old binaries in C# with no runtime dependencies, that would make it a truly compelling language IMO.
And as another question, what's the cross-platform (mainly Linux) support like in AOT-compiled C#? If it's just as good as in Windows and emits plain executables, I would probably consider it the best place to start for any new project. (Something tells me it's not...)