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Building a self-contained game in C# under 2 kilobytes
- mgerullis 3y agoSadly the video won’t play on my iPhone
- MStrehovsky 3y agoIt's a webm, looks like Apple still didn't implement it on iPhones. Here is another version of the video on a website that may work better on iPhones: https://twitter.com/MStrehovsky/status/1742101904250060842 https://twitter.com/MStrehovsky/status/1742101904250060842
- josteink 3y agoIf you have VLC installed on your iPhone, it can play it from this link: https://migeel.sk/blog/2024/01/02/building-a-self-contained-game-in-csharp-under-2-kilobytes/game.webm https://migeel.sk/blog/2024/01/02/building-a-self-contained-...
- deafpolygon 3y ago"Win32 is the only stable ABI on Linux" ;)
- littlecranky67 3y ago"This will produce a single EXE file that is whopping 64 MB in size. [...] You might say “still better than Electron” and call it good, but let’s see if we can do better."
- TillE 3y agoThis is really cool, but it's funny to use C# primarily as an awkward substitute for C as you call Win32. For most practical purposes, the default .NET 8 AOT is great if you really need native code.
- pjmlp 3y agoWindows Forms is basically this, a better MFC version, and even if it was only for faster startup times, NGEN has been there since day 1. The biggest issue has been WinDev, that contrary to Google's culture in ChromeOS and Android, they will kill any attempt to touch their precious COM and C++ tools, thus the way the Longhorn project went down, only to see its ideas redone in COM, and WinRT coming to existence.
- gwervc 3y agoWinRT is one of the biggest fail of Microsoft in the last decades. Instead of pushing for a multiplatform .NET implementation with a portable UI (Silverlight OOB was just that), or even running on most Windows versions, we got framework over framework (WinRT, UWP, WinUI) that are only compatible with the last version of Windows and don't bring value over WPF.
- pjmlp 3y agoSpeaking as someone that bought into it, WinRT was kind of the .NET idea before they went with a Java clone (Ext-VOS), they didn't fail only on features, they failed on how it was managed. From the forced rewrites across Windows 8, 8.1 and 10, as the platform was maturing, the deprecation of C++/CX, replaced by less capable C++/WinRT (now in maintainance, while they are having fun in Rust/WinRT), deprecation of .NET Native without parity in Native AOT, no designer, and plenty of other broken stuff. It was for this that WinDev kind of sabotaged Longhorn efforts, thanks very much. Meanwhile Google shows what happens when everyone pushes into the same direction, even if it takes some growing pains (with lots of cash) to get there.
- flohofwoe 3y agoHeh, I thought exactly the same seeing the code: "This looks almost exactly like C talking to Win32, except slightly more awkward" :)
- Genbox 3y agoI love the low level .NET stuff Michael Strehovsky makes. Microsoft has built a feature-rich and easy-to-use environment, but it makes .NET developers think there is only one way to use it: create csproj and call dotnet build. But underneath the covers, there is an extremely powerful compiler (Roslyn) and build-system (msbuild). Combine that with the flexibility of C# and you can develop pretty much anything.
- pjmlp 3y agoWe know the other ways, in fact stuff like NGEN have been a CLI set of commands since the early days. However .NET (alongside Java), has a culture of great tooling, we only do stones and sticks programming when there is no way around it.
- flohofwoe 3y agoDon't forget the Win32 API which allows to create a window and run an event loop with a handful of simple function calls (even in C# apparently). Then compare that to the APIs that came after (like UWP and WinUI) and shudder in horror.
- dgellow 3y agoWin32 and WinUI serve different purposes, they aren’t meant to replace one another. Win32 is simple but also really low level. It’s great to get a window handler and handle low level events but building a modern graphical UI requires at minimum a layout system, that’s where WinUI comes handy. Also you can now mix Win32 with WinUI via the concept of XAML island. It’s not perfect but you don’t have to be blocked in one world or the other. Though I personally prefer dealing with WPF via AvaloniaUI, styling with winUI is often too frustrating… https://www.avaloniaui.net/ https://www.avaloniaui.net/
- pjmlp 3y agoThey were in the days of WinRT/UAP/UWP, but that backfired, and with the mismanagemt no one cares about WinUI 3.0 anyway. Hence why there is even documentation on how to migrate, now legacy. https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2014/07/24/introduction-to-universal-windows-apps-in-windows-8-1-and-windows-phone-8-1/ https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2014/07/24/introd... "Roadmap for Windows Runtime apps using C++" https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/apps/hh700360(v=win.10) https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/... "Win32 and COM APIs for UWP apps" https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/uwp/win32-and-com/win32-and-com-for-uwp-apps https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/uwp/win32-and-com/win32-an... Specially the subsection "Alternatives to Win32 and COM API".
- MStrehovsky 3y agoSomeone with an iPhone told me the webm video embedded in the article still doesn't work on iPhones in 2024 so here's another link to the video: https://twitter.com/MStrehovsky/status/1742101904250060842 https://twitter.com/MStrehovsky/status/1742101904250060842
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- delta_p_delta_x 3y agoIt is pretty impressive that even without third-party tools, the binary went from 64 MB to ~1 MB. IMO future versions of .NET should add more of such optimisation flags as default in a Release build.
- mobiuscog 3y agoIt would be really interesting to see how small it could stay whilst adding in support for OpenGL.
- pjmlp 3y agoSide note, one of the first commercial games written in .NET used OpenGL, released in 2004 long before XNA. It was a RTS game and quite cool, Arena Wars.
- rkagerer 3y agoAgreed, it feels like there's still low-hanging fruit there.
- orthoxerox 3y agoYou don't want these optimisations to be on by default. Trimming can cause bugs when your program or one of its libraries relies on reflection and Native AOT is good for startup time (FaaS), but tiered JIT will likely outperform it in long-running applications.
- SirMaster 3y agoNo, but I learned from this that self-contained builds can be compressed. Why isn't that an option in the publish gui of vs 2022?
- delta_p_delta_x 3y ago> when your program or one of its libraries relies on reflection Fair enough; perhaps it'd be worthwhile to throw a compiler error if both reflection and trimming were attempted. > Native AOT is good for startup time (FaaS), but tiered JIT will likely outperform it in long-running applications This is intriguing; could you elaborate on the latter? Would tiered JIT perhaps have more runtime information which would be more useful when optimising frequently-accessed code paths or tight loops?
- tiberriver256 3y agoHe makes this look easy! Surprising how far you can take things with OOTB .NET.
- nwellinghoff 3y agoVery cool. What are the practical implications for this? Would it ever be wise to deploy these techniques for a commercial program? Is the end result more memory efficient during execution?
- flohofwoe 3y agoA small binary size is at least useful when running code in web browsers via WASM. Granted, 2 KByte would be way below diminishing returns, but even a couple of hundred KBytes is rare with high level languages like C# which usually require a big runtime. Even "we care about binary size at all" would be a major step forward for most "professional" applications.
- mlhpdx 3y agoI’m using some of these techniques to minimize the size of my executables for use with a AWS Lambda and on embedded Linux projects.
- Snow_Falls 3y agoThe problem with video games and binary sizes is that the assets (3d models, audio, etc) take far more space than the binaries. And its much harder to compress then while still getting good loading times and high quality.
- flohofwoe 3y agoThat's a bit of a separate problem since assets can be downloaded as needed in the background while the game is already running, but to even start the game, the first thing that's required is the WASM asset blob so that should be small.
- Snow_Falls 3y agoAh that is true, I forgot that you could stream assets via web in a browser. But, surely if you can stream the large assets quickly enough for a decent experience (even with caching) then the initial blob size isn't going to take too long to download in the first place?
- askiiart 3y agoIn a similar vein, there's Can you fit a whole game into a QR code? by MattKC, which is limited to about 3 kilobytes (2,953 bytes) https://youtu.be/ExwqNreocpg https://youtu.be/ExwqNreocpg
- WhereIsTheTruth 3y agoMichal and the whole CoreRT team saved C# for me, one of the very few people i respect from Microsoft
- TheRealPomax 3y agoPretty sure you just joined the demo scene.
- TheRealPomax 3y ago(also pretty sure some folks apparently have no idea what the demo scene is, or how much of a compliment that was)