You don't even need native AOT for that, you can already create self-contained binaries with .NET Core. Those have fewer restrictions than native AOT, they bundle the necessary runtime.
They have some annoying downsides: they unpack the runtime when you run them. This can cause problems like "virus scanner takes time looking at each .dll unpacked" and "fill up the disk they're unpacked into".
If they don't fix this by version 8 I might have to build my own CLR apphost solution :(
I don't think that is the case anymore. I think it also was platform-specific before and only applied to Linux. But I couldn't find the exact change with a quick search.
I believe this got fixed in .NET 5; now only native libraries need to be extracted and stored elsewhere on disk, and many applications can get by without native dependencies.
> When the app starts, the managed DLLs are extracted and loaded in memory, avoiding the extraction to a folder.
