GitHub - dotnet/Silk.NET: The high-speed OpenGL, OpenCL, OpenAL, OpenXR, GLFW, SDL, Vulkan, Assimp, WebGPU, and DirectX bindings library your mother warned you about.
🚧 Silk.NET 3.0 is coming... 🚧
We are currently hard at work on Silk.NET 3.0 - the latest and greatest Silk.NET, laser-focused on addressing pain points and reimagining how C# bindings libraries can be done.
Because of this, Silk.NET 2.X investment is currently limited by the Silk.NET team, who consist entirely of volunteers working in their free time. Silk.NET 2.X updates are now released ad-hoc when development effort is justified and available.
If you're reading this and would like to step up to keep Silk.NET 2.X going, be that as a contributor or a maintainer, please do not hesitate to reach out to the Silk.NET team in our official Discord server!
Learn more about Silk.NET 3.0:
SilkX (Silk.NET 3.0) Design Discussion
Silk.NET is your one-stop-shop for high-speed .NET multimedia, graphics, and compute; providing bindings to popular low-level APIs such as OpenGL, OpenCL, OpenAL, OpenXR, GLFW, SDL, Vulkan, Assimp, WebGPU, and DirectX.
Use Silk.NET to spruce up applications with cross-platform 3D graphics, audio, compute and haptics!
Silk.NET works on any .NET Standard 2.0 compliant platform, including .NET 6.0, Xamarin, .NET Framework 4.6.1+, and .NET Core 2.0+.
Proud to be an official project under the benevolent
umbrella.
Features
Performance
Having poured lots of hours into examining generated C# code and its JIT assembly, you can count on us to deliver blazing fast bindings with negligible overhead induced by Silk.NET!
Up-to-date
With an efficient bindings regeneration mechanism, we are committed to ensuring our bindings reflect the latest specifications with frequent updates generated straight from the upstream sources.
High-level utilities
In addition to providing high-speed, direct, and transparent bindings, we provide high-level utilities and wrappers to maximise productivity in common workloads such as platform-agnostic abstractions around Windowing and Input, bringing your apps to a vast number of platforms without changing a single line!
Good-to-go
Silk.NET caters for anything you could need in swift development of multimedia, graphics, compute applications. Silk.NET is an all-in-one solution, complete with Graphics, Compute, Audio, Input, and Windowing.
The team
We currently have the following maintainers:
(3.0)
(2.X)
In addition, the Silk.NET working group help drive larger user-facing changes providing key consultation from the perspective of dedicated users and professionals.
Building from source
Prerequisites
.NET 6 SDK and .NET 7 SDK
Android, iOS, and Mac Catalyst workloads (use dotnet workload install android ios maccatalyst to install them) On Linux, ios and maccatalyst should be omitted as they are not available
Android SDK versions 31, 33, and 34 with NDK tools installed On Windows, for best results, this should be installed into C:\ProgramData\Android\android-sdk
Java JDK 11+
Visual Studio 2022 Community version 17.0 or later (optional)
Instructions
Clone the repository Note: Avoid performing a recursive clone as the submodules are not necessary for a normal build
Run build.sh, build.cmd, build.ps1, or nuke compileOn Linux, you may need to pass --msbuild-properties AndroidSdkDirectory=/path/to/android/sdk
Use the built assemblies To get .nupkgs that you can use with NuGet instead, use nuke pack
There are more advanced build actions you can do too, such as FullBuild, Pack, FullPack, among others which you can view by doing nuke --plan.
Contributing
Silk.NET uses and encourages
. Please don't wait until you're done to open a PR!
Add an empty commit to a new branch to start your work off: git commit --allow-empty -m "start of [thing you're working on]"
Once you've pushed a commit, open a
. Do this before you actually start working.
Make your commits in small, incremental steps with clear descriptions.
Tag a maintainer when you're done and ask for a review!
The Silk.NET solution is very large. Learn about how you can combat this using our build process in
.
Funding
Silk.NET requires significant effort to maintain, as such we greatly appreciate any financial support you are able to provide! This helps ensure Silk.NET's long term viability, and to help support the developers who maintain Silk.NET in their free time.
is accepting GitHub Sponsorships.
Further resources
Several examples can be found in the
Come chat with us on
!
Licensing and governance
Silk.NET is distributed under the very permissive MIT/X11 license and all dependencies are distributed under MIT-compatible licenses.
Silk.NET is a
project, and has adopted the code of conduct defined by the
to clarify expected behavior in our community. For more information, see the
.NET Foundation Code of Conduct
.
———
Special thanks to
for supporting us with open-source licenses for their IDEs.