ComputeSharp VS FLTK

A couple other options than what has been suggested so far: - TerraFX.Interop.Windows. Raw, blittable, 1:1 bindings for all Win32, D2D/D3D11/D3D12 APIs (there's also a version with Vulkan bindings). As close to doing #include as you can get in C#. This is my personal favorite, I use it in my own ComputeSharp library, and transitively we use it in the Microsoft Store too 🙂 - Silk.NET another version of high-performance bindings, more opinionated than TerraFX and with some additional helpers to make it a bit easier to use.

A hello world .NET console app with NativeAOT is 1.08 MB. Goes down to 1.08 MB with some tweaking. Goes below 1MB with more tweaking. I have a fully self-contained NativeAOT sample app that renders some fancy animated shaders with DX12 that's about 2MB in size.

I dont think it's exactly what you're looking for, but I've found ComputeSharp to be a great C# GPU tool

Here's some: - MVVM Toolkit - PolySharp - ComputeSharp

If you don't mind being Windows only, I would also recommend trying out (shameless plug) ComputeSharp. You can find it on NuGet and it's available for UWP and WinUI 3 as well with ready to use XAML controls. The point is that it would allow you do your entire rendering via pixel/compute shaders, so it could basically run entirely on the GPU. That'd allow you to render even millions of particles with pretty good performance 🙂

Create a UWP or WinUI 3 applicaation and use the AnimatedComputeShaderPanel from ComputeSharp. The library lets you write shaders (ie. code to run on the GPU) entirely in C#, and handles all the logic to setup a DX12 animated swapchain, similar to Win2D. If you look at the repo you can also see a whole bunch of examples, which you can also try out for yourself. There's also several wiki pages with lots of info.

Another dark horse is FLTK: https://www.fltk.org/. For utilities this might be your best choice, especially because static linking is supported. This is mostly a C++ solution but there are bindings to other solutions.

Fl_Flex (shameless plug!) is now officially in upstream FLTK since 1.4 for a "flexbox style" layout manager.

Go ahead and sell an FLTK product then. I'm sure you go to https://www.fltk.org/ and think those GUI's look awesome you delusional moron

FLTK

A few examples: Dear ImGui, SFML, FLTK. Probably even Tk could be used.

FLTK (Fast Light Toolkit) is a lightweight, cross-platform supported toolkit for building GUIs. FLTK is supported on Windows, macOS, and UNIX systems and was originally built for C++. If you use the FLTK toolkit to create a GUI application, the application looks the same on all supported operating systems.

There are a lot of options and they're not that hard to find... Qt, wxWidgets, FLTK, IUP come immediately to mind.

FLTK. It's a cross-platform C++ GUI toolkit for UNIX®/Linux® (X11), Microsoft® Windows®, and MacOS® X.