The latest release of Uno Platform, version 4.4, brings significant improvements to WebAssembly support, enhancing the toolkit’s capabilities for building cross-platform applications with C# and XAML. Uno Platform is an open-source framework that allows developers to create applications for desktop, mobile, and web using a single codebase. With these updates, the platform is making it easier and more efficient to develop WebAssembly-based web applications, offering better performance and new features that were previously not available in the ecosystem.
Uno Platform 4.4, released on June 28, includes WebAssembly-related features that were activated ahead of their official integration into Microsoft’s .NET 7. This early activation allows developers to experiment with the new features or even use them in production environments. The most notable improvements are related to WebAssembly exceptions and threading support, which are crucial for optimizing the performance and usability of web applications.
By enabling WebAssembly exceptions, Uno Platform allows applications to handle exceptions entirely within the WebAssembly environment. This change leads to better performance, as it eliminates the need to rely on the JavaScript runtime for exception handling. Additionally, the size of the generated code is reduced, making the applications more lightweight and efficient to load and run in browsers.
WebAssembly threading support is another key enhancement in this release. It has been added to both Uno.UI and Uno Bootstraper, providing developers with the ability to create threads or tasks. With the ability to use CoreDispatcher and Dispatcher to return to the main thread, web apps can now offload heavy computations to background threads without freezing the UI. This improvement significantly boosts the performance of web applications, making them more responsive and capable of handling resource-intensive tasks smoothly.