.NET Rocks! Avalonia 12 with Mike James & Matt Lacey
Mar 12, 2026
Matt Lacey, a developer focused on Avalonia tooling and VS integration. Mike James, CEO driving cross-platform rendering and sustainability. They discuss Avalonia 12, the switch toward Google's Impeller renderer for better mobile and embedded performance, new Accelerate tooling and commercial offerings, and collaboration with MAUI and Flutter-related teams.
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Moving Toward Impeller For Mobile Performance
- Avalonia is evaluating replacing Skia with Google's Impeller for better performance on tile-based GPUs like phones and modern Macs.
- Mike James describes collaborating with the Flutter/Impeller team to adapt Impeller beyond Flutter's assumptions.
Real Production Use On Low Spec Devices
- Mike runs Avalonia on very low-spec hardware including a Raspberry Pi and even a 2002-era 500MHz ARM device in production.
- He recounts optimizing heavily for that customer to demonstrate the framework's embedded strengths.
V12 As Experimental Platform For Backends
- Avalonia 12 ships with SkiaSharp as default but will experiment with Impeller in previews and integrate it into a later stable release.
- Mike frames V12 as an experimentation milestone to test backends and renderers before V13 stabilization.