A cross-platform desktop GUI back-end for .NET, written in pure C#

This project is currently a work-in-progress.

Traditionally, developing cross-platform graphical applications on .NET has been tricky to say the least. One would require one or more native libraries for each supported platform, to interop with a cross-platform backend (itself another native library with its own idiosyncracies), or to bite the bullet and use a full engine like Unity or MonoGame.

AmityUI aims to be a step in the direction of fully managed, multi-platform desktop applications: a lightweight wrapper around common OS functionality, such as window management, input events, basic 2D drawing, and OpenGL context creation. What's more, there's no native code: only P/invoke and IPC. This means that, within the supported OS backends, one could potentially run the same CLR binary on every device and get a good experience.

Amity aims to be a back-end for other rendering libraries to use, rather than a complete UI framework; more like GLUT than GTK. You can pick whichever renderer you like (take a look at the ImageSharp and SkiaSharp examples), or use the drawing primitives if it fits your use case.

Broadly, Amity aims to be Fast, Simple and Compatible. To do this, we'll aim for the following:

• No native code
• No reflection or code generation
• No heap allocation by frequently-called methods
• Only functionality present on all backends (or easily emulated) added to the interface
• No platform implementation details leaking into the interface
• No extraneous functionality; nothing that could be implemented a layer above with comparable performance.