.NET on game consoles

[shen11AA]

Replace the existing mono and li2cpp with pure .NET on the developer toolchain of Nintendo Switch2 (this technical route should not have been proposed or verified before)

[huoyaoyuan]

See #103065 (comment). There is third-party port for NativeAOT on Nintendo Switch. Currently the development focus of Microsoft is to bring up all major platforms (Android, iOS and browser).

[shen11AA]

参见 #103065 （评论）。Nintendo Switch 上有 NativeAOT 的第三方端口。目前，Microsoft 的开发重点是推出所有主要平台（Android、iOS 和浏览器）。

We are considering evaluating the feasibility and validation of a pure .NET alternative to existing mono, li2cpp on Nintendo Switch2 (using the official version .NET10)It's still the same Nintendo Switch game console.

[huoyaoyuan]

参见#103065 (comment) 和 https://fna-xna.github.io/docs/appendix/Appendix-B%3A-FNA-on-Consoles/ ，NS的SDK是私有的，官方SDK不能直接接入。

[shen11AA]

At present, without official negotiations and official versions, it seems that relying only on the community version may not be able to incorporate its official .NET version into the Nintendo developer toolchain to provide and promote it to all developers.

[huoyaoyuan]

There will not be solution provided by Microsoft, only third-party commercial solution. Game engines like Unity/UE5 are all of this category.

[shen11AA]

However, I am considering not using the existing solutions (i.e., mono, li2cpp).

[huoyaoyuan]

There will not be any information about solution in this repo. Game consoles are specialized OSes with additional SDK required.

[jeffschwMSFT]

cc @steveisok

[shen11AA]

抄送

Calling li2cpp, mono, and third-party XNA together as the community solution can indeed lead to misunderstandings, but I still believe it is necessary to verify and propose discussions, requesting further discussions with the .NET team.

[huoyaoyuan]

Calling li2cpp, mono, and third-party XNA together as the community solution can indeed lead to misunderstandings

il2cpp is developed by Unity, not Microsoft or Mono. MonoGame or Mono on Unity are not developed or owned by Microsoft, either.

[steveisok]

@shen11AA thanks for your interest! We have not yet produced an official build for developer consoles. If your goal is to use Unity, I would recommend all feedback go in their direction. From what I know, they are working on moving to the modern .NET ecosystem and plan to use its IL2CPP toolchain for console platforms. If not, as others have said, NativeAOT is the runtime to use. It is our most portable runtime and is likely the best fit for the console form factor. For your case, I would recommend looking to the community as groups like FNA, W4Consoles (Godot), and Defold have been super proactive in getting C#/NativeAOT to run on consoles.

We hope to continue making Native AOT as portable and fast as possible. When console requirements can be merged into our mainline supported product, we're excited to do that. Over time we also want to consolidate community efforts around NativeAOT for consoles into a community-driven fork for each console. That will make it easier to upstream changes, and produce console-specific fixes as needed. At the moment we do not have supported official builds, so console users would have to pull from the forks, but as long as the effort is centralized, this can be a routine process. We've already done this for XBox (.NET 9), are slowly crawling through PlayStation, and hope to address Switch after that.

As to Switch2-specific patches, we haven't had a chance to see what's different from the original Switch. We know that community members have successfully built Native AOT for Switch. The next step would be to identify differences between Switch2 and Switch and create patches for those differences.

[shen11AA]

感谢您的关注！我们尚未为开发人员控制台生成正式版本。如果您的目标是使用 Unity，我建议所有反馈都朝着他们的方向发展。据我所知，他们正在努力迁移到现代 .NET 生态系统，并计划将其 IL2CPP 工具链用于控制台平台。如果不是，正如其他人所说，NativeAOT 就是要使用的运行时。它是我们最可移植的运行时，可能最适合控制台外形规格。对于您的情况，我建议您查看社区，因为 FNA、W4Consoles （Godot） 和 Defold 等组织在让 C#/NativeAOT 在控制台上运行方面非常积极主动。

我们希望继续使 Native AOT 尽可能便携和快速。当主机要求可以合并到我们的主线支持产品中时，我们很高兴能做到这一点。随着时间的推移，我们还希望将社区围绕控制台 NativeAOT 的工作整合到每个控制台的社区驱动分支中。这将使上游更改变得更加容易，并根据需要生成特定于控制台的修复。目前我们没有支持的官方版本，因此控制台用户必须从分叉中提取，但只要工作是集中的，这可能是一个例行过程。我们已经为 XBox （.NET 9） 做了这件事，正在慢慢地爬过 PlayStation，并希望在那之后解决 Switch。

至于特定于 Switch2 的补丁，我们还没有机会看到与原始 Switch 有什么不同。我们知道社区成员已经成功构建了 Switch 原生 AOT。下一步是确定 Switch2 和 Switch 之间的差异，并为这些差异创建补丁。

However, I feel that it cannot be solely driven by the third-party community (integration of .NET10 into the developer toolchain for Nintendo Switch2, which has the same ARM processor as the previous generation of Nintendo Switch, and increased storage from 32G to 256G) but should be done at the official level.