Would be nice to have a portable library

[lostmsu]

Otherwise any client of Cecil has to stick to compile-time directives to implement portability

[jbevain]

Agreed. It would be nice to have a PCL compatible configuration (not a new csproj).

[benpye]

Has there been any progress on this goal? This is something that would also serve useful for my current project as ideally I'd use Cecil within my PCL, currently I'm having to perform the processing externally.

[jbevain]

@benpye Hey Ben,

I'm glad you pinged! I did put some work on this, and pushed it last week to the pcl branch, where you get a read only Cecil to read assemblies that work on the PCL profile.

Quite a lot of strings have to be stripped for this compile, obviously.

I was wondering it was worth merging or not.

Could you describe what is your scenario?

[benpye]

Apologies for the slow response, life has been busy.

The use case for the PCL build in this case is to generate code from the assembly, eg. GLSL. This at least partially would ideally happen in a PCL with then the actual code generation in another binary. I haven't looked into getting ICSharpCode.Decompiler as a PCL yet however as that is another library that would be almost required.

[jbevain]

Hey @benpye,

No worry, quite busy here too :)

You can't load generated code with the PCL profile, so again, I'm seriously doubt the usefulness.

[benpye]

The PCL will generate an AST hopefully which then platform specific code can handle. The alternative is to generate the AST in the platform code maybe using the shared projects functionality.

[rprouse]

@jbevian, we are considering using Cecil in NUnit 3 to help with exploring and executing tests. We were hoping for a PCL version to help target Xamarin and other platforms with a single codebase.

I haven't gone very deeply down this track, but I wanted to let you know of our intentions so we can coordinate if you decide to look at this again. I have forked the repo over to the nunit org and will play with it there. I will report back once I know more.

[jbevain]

@rprouse there's the pcl branch.

[rprouse]

@jbevain, thanks. I pulled it last night and merged latest from master. I will experiment with it in nunit tonight.

[jbevain]

Moving this discussion in #220.