René's URL Explorer Experiment

{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"DiscussionForumPosting","headline":"The status of this repo and other cross platform C# IDEs","articleBody":"Since there were still people visiting this repo, I think it might make sense to capture the current state of things in a short notice after #109.\n\nThrough tremendous effort by @knuxbbs @lytico @gluckez @hwthomas @MakiWolf and others, this repo restored the GTK based code editor for MonoDevelop to build once again against GTK2 on Linux in 2022-2023.\n\nIt would be more challenging than ever to move on from that spot, because\n\n- GTK itself has breaking API changes in GTK 2-\u003e3-\u003e4. The effort to porting to GTK3 has been showed to be overwhelming (based on @MakiWolf's pull requests), and more difficult to GTK4. In the end, GTK might not be a sustainable option if it keeps breaking backwards compatibility.\n- The dependency on Mono is also limiting the key dependencies like MSBuild and so forth, which blocked upgrade to more recent .NET releases (.NET 7+). WineHQ took over maintaining the mono runtime but didn't show interest in expanding their scope to IDE like this. So, migrating fully to the latest.NET can be very urgent to keep up with modern development.\n\nWith all the above, this repo doesn't seem to have much momentum left, and people might look elsewhere.\n\n## AvalonStudio\n\nI wrote about [AvalonStudio](https://github.com/VitalElement/AvalonStudio), but it became inactive and stuck with Avalonia 0.10 as Avalonia 11 broke many APIs too.\n\n[There is a fork aiming to upgrade it to Avalonia 11](https://github.com/Zerobak-cash/Avalon-Studio), but still many compilation issues remain. So, that's not going to be an easy approach to finish. Besides,\n\n* AvalonStudio is with a stricter license.\n* AvalonStudio doesn't have a mature extension API like SharpDevelop/MonoDevelop.\n\n## SharpIDE\n\nIt was recent that [SharpIDE came to my attention](https://github.com/MattParkerDev/SharpIDE), which is based on Godot, a cross-platform game engine. It remains fresh and lots of work is being done,\n\n- It might depend on certain packages/assemblies from Microsoft that were not open sourced or licensed to be used outside the VS family. They might be replaced with equivalent open source implementations so as to ensure license compliance.\n- The license choice was AGPL but recently changed to MIT.\n- There isn’t yet an extension API.\n\nIf any reader of this wants to contribute to an open source C#/.NET IDE, maybe you want to check out a young IDE without much history burden and help shape its future.\n\n","author":{"url":"https://github.com/lextm","@type":"Person","name":"lextm"},"datePublished":"2025-12-02T09:51:12.000Z","interactionStatistic":{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":"https://schema.org/CommentAction","userInteractionCount":5},"url":"https://github.com/163/dotdevelop/issues/163"}