Paul Krill
Editor at Large

Uno Platform advances WebAssembly support

news
Jul 1, 20222 mins

Multi-platform UI toolkit for .NET enables WebAssembly threads and exceptions ahead of official .NET 7 support.

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Credit: Andre Chinn

With the latest release of the Uno Platform, an open-source toolkit for building cross-platform desktop, mobile, and web applications with C# and XAML, developers get improved performance via tweaks for the WebAssembly binary instruction format.

Uno Platform 4.4 was announced June 28. The developers of the platform said they have activated WebAssembly-related features ahead of official support in Microsoft’s  .NET 7 platform, enabling experimentation or use in production. The biggest improvements are in WebAssembly exceptions and threading support.

Enabling WebAssembly exceptions in applications allows code to stay entirely in WebAssembly for exception handling, thus boosting performance. Generated code is smaller, too. WebAssembly threading support also has been added to Uno.UI and Uno Bootstraper, enabling creation of threads or tasks and use of CoreDispatcher and Dispatcher to return to the main thread. Web apps can perform expensive tasks off the UI thread and avoid freezing the UI.

Uno apps can run on the web via WebAssembly and natively on Windows, iOS, Android, macOS, and Linux. Instructions for getting started with Uno Platform be found on the Uno Platform website. Other improvements in Uno Platform 4.4 include:

  • Fluid animation on .NET, Android, iOS, and Skia-based targets. Skia is a 2D graphics library.
  • Improved default project templates.
  • Small performance improvements for all platforms, including changes to how Android drawables are resolved.
  • New input scenarios via GamePad API.
Paul Krill

Paul Krill is editor at large at InfoWorld. Paul has been covering computer technology as a news and feature reporter for more than 35 years, including 30 years at InfoWorld. He has specialized in coverage of software development tools and technologies since the 1990s, and he continues to lead InfoWorld’s news coverage of software development platforms including Java and .NET and programming languages including JavaScript, TypeScript, PHP, Python, Ruby, Rust, and Go. Long trusted as a reporter who prioritizes accuracy, integrity, and the best interests of readers, Paul is sought out by technology companies and industry organizations who want to reach InfoWorld’s audience of software developers and other information technology professionals. Paul has won a “Best Technology News Coverage” award from IDG.

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