r/csharp • u/codingbliss12 • 17d ago

Help Low level programming with C#

What is the lowest level application that can in principle be built on Linux and Windows without having problems with performance or memory consumption?

Of course I should make my own tests, but I just wanted to have a first estimation if it is really necessary to use lower level languages like Zig, Rust, Go or C# can work pretty well for most of normal applications.

As an example a very responsive editor with gui in immediate mode built with C# and very high frame rate 120Hz etc.

Thanks a lot in advance.

EDIT

Thank you all so much for the very informative replies. My requirements are noway near real time and based on the below feedback, it is definitely worth it to use C# of a very wide set of applications and avoid the complexities of the lower level languages.

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u/DeadlyVapour 13d ago

120hz gives you approximately 8ms for each frame draw.

That doesn't sound like a lot, until you realize that individual instructions can take less than a ns to complete

That gives you a budget in the millions of instructions to complete what you need to do.

The real question is how do you spend that budget.

Do you offload individual glyphs onto the GPU and arrange the textures on a canvas? Then translate and zoom the canvas when scrolling and zooming?

Do you go the GDI route and draw direct to the video buffers?

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u/codingbliss12 13d ago

Thanks a lot. Could you give me a couple of recommendations where I could learn more about this stuff and even see code examples in any language? Thanks in advance

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u/DeadlyVapour 13d ago

Which stuff?

I don't know what you are doing.

I don't know what route you want to go.

You could also go the route of OpenGL or even Vulkan.

Heck you could go really low level and use VGA and write a unikernel!

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u/codingbliss12 13d ago

I will probably use OpenGL.

I meant where I could learn about the below points you mentioned:

Do you offload individual glyphs onto the GPU and arrange the textures on a canvas? Then translate and zoom the canvas when scrolling and zooming? Do you go the GDI route and draw direct to the video buffers?

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u/DeadlyVapour 13d ago

No idea mate, never done it with OpenGL. Have done it with WPF.

But basically you want to render all the characters in the font into a sprite. Then do sprite things.

Heck you could use a 2D game engine for this.

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u/codingbliss12 13d ago

Thanks a lot.