zznty / Hybrid

Hybrid (.NET AOT + WebViews)

The problem

As many of you know, there is no ultimate desktop (mobile in the future?) cross-platform framework.

Qt, Uno, Avalonia, MAUI are all falling into a developer UX pit where just developing for the chosen platform is already full of troubles, limitations from the lack of cross-platform support (Media, Effects, Storage) and if you would even think about shipping an AOTed application, sometimes almost impossible.

The solution

I wanted to create a framework that would let me overcome these limitations (or most of them) with minimal effort.

As the trend for electron applications is raising, HTML/JS/CSS becomes the new standard for cross-platform apps that are straightforward to design and develop, I have decided to go with platform-provided or shipped webview implementations (Chromium/Edge, WebKit), but also utilize c# as a language for the platform code (which is not sandboxed like the rest of the frontend).

Instead of creating some obscure wrappers for interop between .NET and JS, I wrote a hybrid framework that uses direct interop provided by specific webview implementation:

• In the case of WebView2, it is DCOM (OLE Automation)
• For Ultralight and other webkit-based implementations, it is Direct JavaScriptCore Calls

Both of these technologies would provide you with a rich set of features for native OOP patterns such as Reference Tracking and Garbage Collection.

Writing your api is as simple as creating an interface then implementation it

public interface ICalculator
{
    int Add(int a, int b);
}

public class Calculator
{
    public int Add(int a, int b)
    {
        return a + b;
    }
}

And in js you call the Add method from the instance of ICalculator from DI container (or other sources):

chrome.webview.hostObjects.calculator.add(1, 2) // returns 3

Roadmap

• Emit typescript definitions
• WebViews
  • WebView2 (Windows only)
  • WebKit webview (OSX only)
  • WebKitGtk (GNOME/linux only)
  • maybe CEF (it must have some v8 apis to play with)
  • Ultralight (Windows/OSX)
• COM
  • Get rid of cpp wrapper for COM stuff (write ComSourceGenerator-compatible C# interfaces)
  • Get rid of asm dyncalls for OLE Dispatch
  • Add support for events marshaling
  • Add support for callbacks marshaling
  • Provide built-in marshal of managed Task to js Promise
• Ultralight
  • Add marshaller WebCore->OLE Dispatch (think about a portable portion of COM/OLE Dispatch)
    • ComWrappers api is intended to provide portable COM support
  • GL or Vk renderer
• Static link into a single binary
  • WebView2Loader (msft provides .lib)
  • cpp wrapper lib
  • Ultralight libs
  • glfw from Silk.NET