Terminal.Gui doesn't support AOT

[chenjing1294]

Are there plans to support AOT?

[BDisp]

I think you are meaning about AOT (Ahead-of-time compilation). I don't have enough knowledge about that, but I think it only supports JIT (Just-in-time compilation).

[tznind]

If you add the following to UICatalog.csproj and compile with dotnet publish -r win-x64 -c Release then you get 31 warnings:

But the resulting binary does run and doesn't seem to crash at all when I navigate around it. If these warnings can be addressed that would be great. Any way I could tempt you into submitting a PR to address these @chenjing1294 ?

Alternatively if you could go into more detail on why you need AoT or any specific (non warning) issues you've had using AOT with Terminal.Gui we could perhaps address those?

  <PropertyGroup>
    <PublishAot>true</PublishAot>	
    <StripSymbols>true</StripSymbols>
</PropertyGroup>

[chenjing1294]

But running on my computer will report an error:(develop or v2_develop branch)

PS C:\Users\chenjing\GitRepository\Terminal.Gui\UICatalog\bin\x64\Release\net7.0\win-x64\publish> .\UICatalog.exe
Unhandled Exception: System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.
   at UICatalog.UICatalogApp.Main(String[]) + 0x122
   at UICatalog!<BaseAddress>+0x2bf1eb

[tznind]

Ah I think I was running the wrong binary. I see your issue. What is your goal? AOT is usually used for webapps and is about fast startup and performance critical situations (e.g. microservices/kubernetes etc).

If the goal is to ship a single executable that does not require a framework install then you can instead use publish single file.

<PropertyGroup>
	<PublishSingleFile>true</PublishSingleFile>
	<RuntimeIdentifiers>win-x64</RuntimeIdentifiers>
</PropertyGroup>

I have created a PR (#2422) which fixes the one error I can see when runing under those settings. The result is a 68MB binary.

There are 3 actions to supporting AOT if thats still a requirement. AOT forces trimming and imo that is a barrier for UICatalog since it leans heavily on reflection to build/discover Scenarios.

• Support PublishSingleFile in UICatalog (see my PR)
• Supporting PublishTrimmed / AOT in gui.cs itself (e.g. proof of concept example app)
• Supporting PublishTrimmed in UICatalog (requires rewritting all the reflection)
• Supporting AOT (probably this will just work after the above 2 are done)

Here is a small investigation into what supporting PublishTrimmed would involve. WIP-#2423