Mobile using Xamarin.Forms

[Gerharddc]

I am sure someone must have thought of this already and that there is a valid reason for dismissing it, but I am wondering why the mobile strategy is not to wrap Xamarin.Forms instead of Xamarin.iOS, Xamarin.Android and Windows RT individually? I mean Xamarin.Forms already does sort of what Eto does but with a different syntax doesn't it?

[cwensley]

This is a very good question; Eto.Forms has existed much long before Xamarin.Forms hence is why it initially targeted iOS, Android and WinRT separately.

It is certainly now an option to support the mobile space. From my understanding of Xamarin.Forms, it does not support a Drawing API so that will still have to be implemented per-platform. Also, Xamarin.Forms adds another layer between Eto and the native api, adding more overhead (I have heard that Xamarin.Forms is very slow in certain circumstances already).

Apparently, @thereverand has already started on this, with a repo here. I'm not sure of how far along it is yet though but seems promising!

Hope this helps!
Curtis.

[Gerharddc]

@cwensley Ok thanks that helps. @thereverand 's project does seem promising. I hope it gets completed. I am not sure what the drawing platform covers but I am assuming that the Mono wrapper of Cairo for C# might be able to help because I believe they used it to implement System.Drawing in Mono. I am guessing Cairo is pretty portable with an OpenGL backend in progress if I am not mistaken. But I am no expert on this. I also do not need a drawing API (yet I guess...).

Regarding performance though, I would imagine that some sort of caching system might be useful. I know it will be a lot of work but maybe someone has the time, who knows... My idea would be that the system could check for any changes and otherwise just parse an optimized binary file that can then be "executed" with a reference table or something thereby elimination all calculations and such. But again this is just a crazy idea and I guess Xamarin.Forms would also need something like this.