wtf is aotrino?

AOTrino lets you build Windows desktop apps that look and feel like Electron apps, but without shipping a whole Chromium browser or requiring a runtime install. It uses the WebView2 component already built into Windows to show your web page, paired with .NET compiled directly to native code, so the whole thing ships as a single executable file that is often around 11 megabytes, or as small as about 4 megabytes when compressed. The window itself is a normal Windows window, and the interface inside it is an ordinary web page, with the two sides talking to each other through a typed bridge you register in your C# code. AOTrino is built as four optional layers you can stack as needed. At the bottom, you can write plain HTML with no build step at all and call into .NET directly. On top of that, an optional package adds typed TypeScript access to that same bridge. Above that, an optional React package adds convenient hooks and window drag behavior. At the top, an optional Fluent UI layer gives your app Windows' own visual look, including matching the user's theme automatically. To get started you only need the .NET 10 SDK, since the WebView2 runtime is already present on any up to date Windows machine, and a new project can be created and run with a couple of command line commands. Publishing a single distributable executable requires also installing the Microsoft Visual C++ build tools, since the AOT compiler relies on a linker that does not ship with the SDK by itself. The project includes fourteen sample apps demonstrating different capabilities, from a minimal forty line hello world app, to drawing directly onto a shared graphics buffer, to translucent Windows 11 style backgrounds, to a small file explorer and even a basic web browser. It only runs on Windows, across x86, x64, and ARM64 processors, and the README does not mention support for macOS or Linux, nor does it state a software license.