.NET Interoperatibility with Java and Swift

Microsoft described .NET 5 to be the “future of .NET”. Fourth preview of NET 5 has been published but general availability is due to release in Novemeber 10, 2020.

Out of all the new features and improvements in .NET 5, one exciting addition is Java and Swift interoperability that will be supported on multiple operating systems. Microsoft’s goal of .NET 5 is to provide a unified .NET SDK experience, supporting both native and web application with a single base class library across all .NET 5 applications.

.NET Schedule

Instead of using the term core, they used .NET 5 for simplification and to convey the uniform capabilities and behaviours of .NET 5.

By expanded Objective-C and Swift interop you can create your own small game engine runing across Mac, Linux and Windows, utilizing modern graphics APIs, written entirely in C# and orginized as uniform .NET 5 library.

Basically, they intend to take the Java interop that Mono already supports and improve it as needed to make it available to other scenarios as well beyond just Android.

Now there is a hope for windows desktop applications to become truly cross platform. With just one .NET going forward, we will be able to use it to target iOS, Android, macOS, Windows, Linux and WebAssembly and more. However, cross-platform GUI library is not included yet.