> In .NET 6, in-memory single file apps have been enabled for Windows and macOS. In .NET 5, this deployment type was limited to Linux. You can now publish a single-file binary that is both deployed and launched as a single file, for all supported OSes. Single files apps no longer extract any core runtime assemblies to temporary directories.

This is a great! Now I can publish statically linked executables and run it everywhere. I don't have to tolerate Golang and its quirks just to have cross-compilation and static binaries, even though they will be larger in size.

>> Single files apps no longer extract any core runtime assemblies to temporary directories

I might be ignorant here but if you're not specifically pointing out what version DLL's you want, aren't you in fact publishing a dynamically linked executable instead of a statically linked one?

Doesn't these single-file apps rely on the GAC?

The whole runtime gets included in the binary.

Does this mean you need one binary per OS so that the runtime matches, or do they do some magic so that one single binary can run on all Oses ?

You create a single binary which has the runtime and dependencies self contained within.

You of course have to choose your target platform for this as it makes .exes for Windows, ELFs for Linux, etc.

If you want you can still choose to distribute IL DLLs and users then use their already installed dotnet on their machine to run them.

https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan

(but, yeah, you probably want one version per target, even if hacks are cool)