[UNO + WIN] Trying to understand how to works.

[DierkDroth]

I always thought that the idea of UNO would be 'replicating' the WinUI3/WindowsAppSDK functionality on other platforms like mobile, web... Meaning on Windows plain WinUI3 would be used and on the other target platforms UNO.

Since recent releases and in this announcement I see that UNO would be using Skia for rendering on Windows - so, not Windows native (WinUI3).

Could you please clarify:

• is Windows native (= WinUI3) used on Windows? or something different (Skia?)?
• if not Windows native: what's used instead and what's the reasoning of not using Windows native? what are the upsides and downsides?

Thanks in advance

[francoistanguay]

When creating app, you can still definitely optionally select Windows App SDK as a target. By default, we now offer the Cross-Platform Desktop using Skia for consistency with all the other platforms (Web, Mobile).

So the WinUI API compatibility remains but by default, we use Skia everywhere.

[DierkDroth]

Thanks for your feedback @francoistanguay

Curious: is there any other upside other than consistency of using the Cross-Platform Desktop + Skia over the Windows App SDK? How about e.g. performance?

[francoistanguay]

We indeed saw cases where performance is better on skia.

We also control Hot Reload on Skia and therefore can offer Hot Design. So Studio on WinAppSDK is unavailable.

We can also fix bugs ourselves without any external dependency on MS.

[DierkDroth]

Thanks for clarification @francoistanguay

It might sense to clarify this particular somewhere in docs - in case it's not already covered.