WinApi

You can do a lot of "native" windows development from modern C#/.NET via win32 interop. Newer C# features like ref returns, structs, spans, et. al., make the overhead undetectable in many cases. https://github.com/prasannavl/WinApi https://github.com/microsoft/CsWin32

Here's an example where ref returns make a big impact: https://github.com/prasannavl/WinApi The performance of this interop layer is so close to native it's difficult to argue for doing things the much more painful way.

If you are wondering what to use today, I'd consider using a new thing bound to an ancient thing: https://github.com/prasannavl/WinApi There are several samples included that should give you a good starting point. The performance of this approach in modern C#/.NET is pretty close to native. Ref returns and what not.

>What happened? Building extremely high quality user interfaces has been de-prioritized by our tech gods. See: ElectronJS. Every "native" "desktop" application built upon such technologies has a minimum latency bound that is user-detectable and a memory appetite that cannot be appeased by even the most opulent workstation-class system. Those of us seeking client->server->client trips that are measured in microseconds (on top of network stack latency) have been forced into the dark nether-reaches of technology. Writing 2D graphics libraries and client/server UI frameworks from scratch has become one of my new favorite hobbies. All of this is especially upsetting when you consider how much complexity has been magically hand-waved away over the last 20 years with modern OS, language and tool design. You don't even have to go to C/C++ to get

I would like to take this opportunity to recommend that everyone who is into C#/.NET Core and high-performance Windows UX development take a look at the following: https://github.com/prasannavl/WinApi I was able to get a workable demo app going in just a few minutes using their Win32 approach. Seems very promising to me for purposes of building native-levels of performance into windows apps using managed C#. The performance statistics published on the repository seem fantastical, but I can believe it now that I've played around with a few of their demos.