
Xamarin Forms - bendiksolheim
https://functional.christmas/2019/11
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benji_is_me
I recently gave xamarin a go using the visual studio integration: it was a
horrible experience. The VS integration was terrible at crucial tasks like
tracking file changes (even with frequent build cleans and restarts), and the
APK sizes were huge compared to native builds. Xamarin forms was still very
awkward to use.

If you try xamarin, don't use it with visual studio. Both dart&flutter and
kotlin feel considerably smoother in my experience, even with the dumpster
fire that is android studio.

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pastrami_panda
I saw a great video on domain driven design in F# a couple weeks back here on
HN, now this. I can't believe I'm saying it but I'm actually curious to try
out Xamarin now!

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dm33tri
A little bit off-topic, but why is .christmas tld all over hacker news today?

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jacobush
And why is the example program written in F#?

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cwyers
Because it's functional.christmas, so everything on it is about functional
programming.

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NonEUCitizen
What is the size of a minimal Fabulous app?

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simendsjo
> What is the size of a minimal Fabulous app?

Agree this is interesting. Historically, Mono-applications on mobile was at
least 10x bigger than Java application as they included the entire runtime
system.

Can the runtime system be shared now? Is .NET Core a thing on mobile, and is
the resulting download smaller?

While download size is no longer a problem for me, my guess is it is still a
big problem many places in the world.

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Sankra
Mono is still used on mobile, but a unification will occur in the future when
.Net Framework is sunset and all there is is .Net 5. .Net will target Windows,
Linux, macOS, iOS, Android, tvOS, watchOS and WebAssembly ++

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rubber_duck
Last time I tried Xamarin Forms was almost 3 years ago so things probably got
a little better with .NET standard and all that jazz but I would NEVER touch
Xamarin Forms even if I was going to use Xamarin again.

The amount of Indian code farm developers generating content for it is surreal
- the community is full of low quality garbage (Q/A, docs, code) - the
official docs and libraries were horrible - like their examples reference a
library that comes from Xamarin (something like contrib repo - don't remember
exactly but a fairly big/common lib) - some control from this lib doesn't work
with latest framework - you try searching for the reason - eventually on the
GH issues you find that the author (some guy at Xamarin) decided the approach
the entire library is taking is a dead end and he's working on another lib -
meanwhile the official one doesn't work against the latest version of the
framework but the docs are still referencing it and it's published under
Xamarin namespace/GH.

The amount of time I spent in that hellhole to get a demo working is surreal -
it would have taken 1/2 the time to build a C# core with native frontends even
in Xamarin toolkit, and with things like Flutter - honestly you are going to
be more productive and get better results if you rewrite the C# logic in Dart
or build a bridge and just do the UI in Flutter. Ionic will not come close in
quality - but for form based apps the productivity is insanely better (even
considering how broken plugins are and the hassle of every other iOS upgrade
breaking your app in some way). Or probably any other mobile frontend tech.

TL;DR: Xamarin (Forms) is by far the worst framework for mobile development
I've tried, and talking to other C# devs that used it on commercial projects
they unanimously agree.

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simendsjo
This doesn't sound good at all. On the flipside, I've heard and read several
people who say Xamarin has been a critical part of their success and like the
ecosystem and libraries.

Three years in IT is a long time, so maybe things have changed? I would love
to hear other experience reports too.

PS: "Indian code farm developrs (...) low quality garbage (...)" is a gross
simplification and generalization which further strengthen negative
stereotypes. I advice a different wording to avoid feeding trolls and haters.

