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Ionide VS Xamarin

Compare Ionide VS Xamarin and see what are their differences

Ionide logo Ionide

Visual Studio Code & Atom plugins for F# development

Xamarin logo Xamarin

Create iOS, Android and Mac apps in C#
  • Ionide Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-02-25
  • Xamarin Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-09-17

Ionide features and specs

No features have been listed yet.

Xamarin features and specs

  • Cross-Platform Development
    Xamarin allows developers to write code once and deploy it across multiple platforms (iOS, Android, and Windows), which can significantly reduce development time and effort.
  • Native Performance
    Apps built with Xamarin perform as well as native apps because they leverage platform-specific hardware acceleration and compile directly to native ARM assembly code.
  • Shared Codebase
    With Xamarin, developers can use a single codebase for different platforms, making it easier to maintain and update apps across multiple operating systems.
  • Large Ecosystem
    As part of the broader .NET ecosystem, Xamarin benefits from a large collection of libraries, tools, and developer resources provided by Microsoft.
  • Strong Community Support
    Xamarin has a strong developer community and comprehensive documentation, making it easier for developers to find support and resources.
  • Integration with Visual Studio
    Xamarin integrates seamlessly with Visual Studio, providing a robust development environment complete with debugging, profiling, and unit testing tools.

Possible disadvantages of Xamarin

  • App Size
    Xamarin apps tend to have larger file sizes compared to native apps because of the additional overhead of the Mono runtime.
  • Limited Third-Party Library Support
    While Xamarin supports a wide range of libraries, not all third-party libraries and SDKs are compatible, which might require custom bindings or workarounds.
  • Performance Overhead
    Some performance overhead might still exist compared to fully native applications, especially in complex and resource-intensive apps.
  • Learning Curve
    Developers coming from purely native development backgrounds might face a learning curve when adopting Xamarin, particularly in understanding the shared codebase approach and platform-specific nuances.
  • Platform Limitations
    Certain platform-specific features and UI elements might not be fully supported or might require additional custom code to implement.
  • Licensing Costs
    Although Xamarin itself is open source, enterprise-level features or more advanced tools might require a Visual Studio Enterprise subscription, which can be costly.

Ionide videos

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Xamarin videos

Pros and Cons of Xamarin Development

More videos:

  • Review - Is Xamarin Forms Any Good?
  • Review - Why Xamarin Is Awesome

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Ionide and Xamarin)
Text Editors
100 100%
0% 0
Developer Tools
7 7%
93% 93
Development Tools
9 9%
91% 91
App Development
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Ionide and Xamarin

Ionide Reviews

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Xamarin Reviews

Explore 9 Top Eclipse Alternatives for 2024
Xamarin.Forms An open-source UI framework that enables developers to conjure up applications for Xamarin.iOS, Xamarin.Android, and Windows from a singular shared codebase. Offers rich features like XAML user-interface language, databinding, gestures, effects, styling.
Source: aircada.com
Top 10 Flutter Alternatives for Cross-Platform App Development
Developed and launched by Microsoft, Xamarin facilitates developers to build apps for iOS and Android by using C# and .NET. It ensures a seamless integration with Visual Studio and lets developers experience a fully familiar environment. The framework provides a single codebase and allows developers to perform app development rapidly.
Exploring 15 Powerful Flutter Alternatives
Xamarin is a Microsoft-created framework for building native iOS, Android, and Windows apps in C#/.NET. On the complexity front, Xamarin apps generally require more focus on memory management and garbage collection tuning relative to alternatives like Flutter. The additional diligence pays dividends in runtime performance when done properly. However, developers with...
THE BEST 34 APP DEVELOPMENT SOFTWARE IN 2022 LIST
Xamarin is a Microsoft-owned tool to write native code for apps. Free. Cross-platform. Open-source. An app platform for building Android and iOS apps with .NET and C#.
9 Of The Best Android Studio Alternatives To Try Out
You can also access the required resources at the Xamarin Universal project. You can stay up to date with the latest updates by subscribing to their YouTube channel or blogs. The Xamarin community is most active, and you can get answers to your questions swiftly.

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Xamarin should be more popular than Ionide. It has been mentiond 28 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Ionide mentions (5)

  • Is there a modern IDE with good support for OCaml?
    I'd love to see something similar to Microsoft's Ionide project or for JetBrains to invest in IDE support. Source: over 2 years ago
  • Why OCaml?
    > Pretty good, https://ionide.io It pains me to admit it because I really like F# but, with due respect to the developers, Ionide and its related projects are the most unstable toolchain I've ever used. Spend half a day reloading the editor because the extension keeps hanging on non-trivial MSBuild only to discover that the formatter has truncated in half one of the files you worked on due to a soundness bug.... - Source: Hacker News / over 2 years ago
  • Why OCaml?
    The DarkLang project was originally written in OCaml and was recently ported to F# (https://blog.darklang.com/new-backend-fsharp/) > How much work would it take in term of code rewriting? There are definitely code changes required, but I think those are quite manageable as concepts mostly map 1:1 from OCaml to F#. > can it compile to native code? Yup,... - Source: Hacker News / over 2 years ago
  • Rust Is Hard, Or: The Misery of Mainstream Programming
    F# doesn't have a hard dependency on vscode. Resources from MS will obviously encourage using MS tooling, but ionide [1] is really good. The lsp+neovim workflow is not as good but getting better. [1] https://ionide.io/. - Source: Hacker News / almost 3 years ago
  • Web Scrapping with F#
    Once we have our dependencies ready, we can start digging in with the code in VSCode using Ionide, Rider or Visual Studio. - Source: dev.to / over 3 years ago

Xamarin mentions (28)

  • Wine Releases Framework Mono 6.14 in Taking over the Mono Project
    I haven't been following .NET lately, but AFAIK .NET works on Linux now and "Mono" is basically .NET for Linux... What even are the differences? Sounds like Microsoft just doesn't want to maintain 2 different versions so they're dumping it. Also, > Microsoft became the steward of the Mono Project when it acquired Xamarin in 2016 They probably never even wanted Mono, they just inherited it because they wanted... - Source: Hacker News / about 2 months ago
  • C# Fundamentals
    Mobile Applications: With Xamarin, a cross-platform mobile development framework, developers can write C# code to build native Android, iOS, and Windows mobile applications. - Source: dev.to / 11 months ago
  • Making an android app with c#
    Xamarin - Basically an older version of MAUI. I would advise against creating new projects on Xamarin since MAUI is supposed to render it obsolete. Source: over 2 years ago
  • App developer
    Microsoft Xamarin: For this you'll need to know C# and .net. Source: over 2 years ago
  • I own a web development company in San Antonio and I'm looking for ideas to support the UTSA students with some sort of free courses or classes
    At my internship, we moved to Microsoft's Visual Studio for C# development from Java, and for application development we use Xamarin which can be used on Windows and Mac. Source: over 2 years ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Ionide and Xamarin, you can also consider the following products

Visual Studio Community - Try our free, fully-featured, and extensible IDE for creating modern developer apps for Windows, Android, & iOS. Download Community for free today!

Android Studio - Android development environment based on IntelliJ IDEA

Microsoft .NET Framework - Microsoft.

OutSystems - Build Enterprise-Grade Apps Fast.

StackBlitz - Online VS Code Editor for Angular and React

Xcode - Xcode is Apple’s powerful integrated development environment for creating great apps for Mac, iPhone, and iPad. Xcode 4 includes the Xcode IDE, instruments, iOS Simulator, and the latest Mac OS X and iOS SDKs.