Uno Platform advances WebAssembly support

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.