Silk.NET is a high-speed bindings library for .NET that provides access to popular low-level multimedia, graphics, and compute APIs.
The library solves the problem of calling native graphics, audio, and compute functions from C# by offering bindings to OpenGL, OpenCL, OpenAL, OpenXR, GLFW, SDL, Vulkan, Assimp, WebGPU, and DirectX. It generates these bindings directly from upstream API specifications to keep them current with the latest standards. The bindings are designed for performance, with careful attention paid to generated code and JIT assembly to minimize overhead.
Silk.NET suits developers building cross-platform 3D graphics applications, audio systems, compute workloads, and haptics features in C#. It works across .NET Standard 2.0 compliant platforms including .NET 6.0, Xamarin, .NET Framework 4.6.1 and later, and .NET Core 2.0 and later. The project is currently in transition, with the team focused on developing version 3.0 to address pain points in the existing design.
The project is maintained entirely by volunteers working in their free time. Development is concentrated on the upcoming 3.0 release, which represents a significant redesign of how the bindings library functions. Silk.NET operates as an official project under the .NET Foundation.
