electron-ipc-sharp

A little experiment: Get a C# app to launch and communicate with Electron using node-ipc

Why?

Because I'm curious. JavaScript has gotten a lot faster, but it's still a single-threaded sandbox. Native Node Modules are really complicated to write, so instead let's flip that paradigm upsidedown: Have Electron and the UI child process be dedicated to UI and UI only, let a core native application handle all the heavy lifting.

A Native app- even a Managed App like with C#- gives us a ton of things we can't easily do in ES2015: access hardware resources, access resources safely, proper threading and deferred tasks, large file access and handling, native GPU access...

There shouldn't be any reason not to use a different language for the Core, e.g. C++ or Rust, or even Java. Future Experiment: make different back-ends for examples?

design thoughts

• C# Core (which I'll just call Core from now on) should run as a single instance with a global mutex.
• Core will start up some kind of IPC
• Core will launch the Electron app
• Electron: UI things. The render process will connect to Core
• Do it in TypeScript or else things will get out of hand.
• What does this all do? I guess I could use it to manage/play music or something.

Building

The Solution File is really only there for the C# Core app at the moment, and it's dotnet core clr so you should be able to cd Core and dotnet restore && dotnet build as normal.

Build the C# app

cd source/Core && dotnet restore && dotnet build

Build all the Typescript

cd source/Ui && npm install && npm run build

Running it

No idea mate.

Opinions

• Use TypeScript. I've seen the light, and it is refactoring some typo I've made in several places somewhere across thousands of files in this project
• Don't use gulp. It's great and all but I've run into far too many problems recently with some gulp plugin being far too out of date- just write some typescript to do what you need and move on.
• stick to cross-platform dotnet core clr for as long as possible.
• Have Windows/Linux/MacOS implementations where necessary
• Prefer runtime platform checking to compile-time #if guarding if at all possible.