CAEFTE

C# and Elm for Tiny Executables.

What's this?

This is a skeleton for building cross-platform (Windows, macOS, Linux), simple, tiny applications with C# and Elm. The resulting application will pop an icon in the notification area, and will be reachable inside the user's browser.

Why C#?

The focus of CAEFTE is on tiny executables. Using C# means leveraging the massive .Net Framework, which is preinstalled on any Windows computer. This gives the developer access to a huge library with minimal footprint.

Why Elm?

Elm is a delightful language for reliable webapps. It's fast, the bundle size is small and the developer experience is awesome.

Why should I use this

An hello world weights about 119k, 22kb if compressed and, on Windows, has no prerequisites.

To run the result on Linux/macOS you need to install mono.

Requisites for compilation

If using Windows, install WSL and use that.

• Parcel;
• make;
• ImageMagick;
• mono;
• pigz or gzip (I strongly recommend installing pigz);
• optipng.

Except for parcel, the other packages should be available in any distro's repositories.

Compile

make -j

The output will be put in the out directory.

Run while developing

make run

This will start a live-reloading server (for the Elm part, the C# part still requires you to stop and restart the server).

Similar projects

Threepenny-gui: https://wiki.haskell.org/Threepenny-gui - Haskell alternative Neutralinojs: https://neutralino.js.org/ - C++ alternative

TODO

• Integrate something like this to fix the notification icon under mono/Linux.
• Investigate whether to use a tray icon vs a notification icon.
• Investigate whether to use a WebView to be more like Electron.
• Investigate detecting being run from the CLI and not popping an icon.
• Implement APIs exposing user types (expose as Elm's records).
• Implement APIs exposing progress [choose between (int, IEnumerable) f() or IEnumerable f(out int)]
• Implement APIs for reading data from body/url

PRs encouraged!