How well does C# work for this cross-platform? Are its executables very large?
I considered using Go for command-line apps - but in my case they often have to interact with existing C++ code. That’s easy enough to do from Python, but I was advised that interop with other languages is an area in which Go is particularly weak.
I think a standalone "Hello World", built with .NET Core, is around 60-70 MB large on both Linux and Windows. The startup times are alright - slower on Windows than on Linux in my experience because of the file system performance.
Lower than this. If I use the AOT compile option with .NET Core 3.1 I get a 40MB binary which goes down to 10MB with the trim option.
Just like Go which embed it’s runtime, .NET Core binary compiled with AOT embed the CLR but, unlike Go, it has options to trim out the pieces that aren’t necessary, which I really like.
It’s not a 70 MB implementation of Hello world. It’s a 70 MB compressed runtime with a standard library (or at least the most basic parts of it) and a couple KB "Hello world".
