ILSpy available for Linux, Mac and Windows

[christophwille]

Today, we merged #3755, and if you scroll to the bottom of the PR, you can see a few screenshots. Do note that as pointed out, prebuilt binaries only exist for Windows at the moment. If you want to give the current bits a try on Mac and Linux, please see https://github.com/icsharpcode/ILSpy#unix--mac on how to build it yourself.

We are preparing a meetup talk (that will be recorded) on all the details how & why we chose Avalonia, how the porting was done with the help of LLMs (pitfalls, learnings, best practices), plus then on top things that we haven't done yet - shipping binaries on different platforms. With that out of the way, the super-short version of what happened and why:

Meet users where they are (going)

That was the main motivation for tackling the crossplatform challenges in the first place. Why is that so you ask? Mac and Linux are way better places for running coding agents, and one thing will make Mac a 1st class platform going forward: local LLMs on the modern Mx processors. So we want to meet our users where they will be. That also goes for us, the core team members: Windows really sucks at the moment, and all the AI enshittification doesn't help (an OS should first and foremost protect data, not be a conveyor into a data furnace - Hello, Android 17!)

We expect there to be quite a few "dark corners" where there will be subtle bugs, so please: take the v10 WPF version and try your workflows in the new v11 UI. Missing shortcuts, gestures, UI glitches, anything really - please create an issue. To make sure we can easily discern it, start the the title of the issue with "V11: ". Thank you!

[lextm]

Congrats on closing the loop.

BTW, Mac will remain a feasible platform to run local LLMs, but Windows ARM64 on Nvidia latest chipsets might easily surpass it later this year with the new product lines from a variety of the vendors.

[christophwille]

A major rewrite always causes friction, and we had settings issues in the (distant) past as well. That was expected to happen, and we are still waaays from a preview1 release. Guess why we are asking for early feedback, and that is why we didn't do any big announcements.

Specifically of note regarding Rover: the *.wpf.cs have been backed out. Just so you know up front.

[christophwille]

As to "Now #3755 is just a rush, that broke too many things in one shot" - only the merge was one shot, development took us many weeks. The timestamps of the commits in the PR are close together only because of certain cleanups at the last minute that meant history rewriting. We didn't care about proper timestamps, but more about being able to bisect later and have buildable commits at every point.

I guess I'd need to go digging as to when Siegi actually made the first foray into the porting exercise.

[christophwille]

So I did some digging - on April 27th Siegi sent me a screenshot with a tongue in cheek comment "ship it":

Two days earlier it was even more walking-skeleton like:

And digging through our chat the real kick-off call was April 11th and actually the first bullet point of the agenda was "meet developers where they are going"

[lextm]

There are multiple cross-platform WPF forks announced in recent months, and one of them is from the author of Dock.Avalonia (chosen by you in this cross-platform attempt).

https://www.reddit.com/r/dotnet/comments/1ueqbno/running_wpf_apps_without_any_code_changes_on/

So, it is interesting to see whichever will come first in the near future, porting the WPF UI via such WPF forks, or vibing an Avalonia UI roughly disconnected from the past.

Besides, a fun project to port ILSpy to Uno Platform is moving fast too.

[christophwille]

Our port to Avalonia is done, the only thing we haven't done yet is provide a full preview1 release (downloading from actions and building yourself of course works today).

The question "whichever comes first" is answered.