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I'm a professional SE so it makes sense for me personally to pay the license fee. They do have some discounts for students or OSS devs, might be worth checking around. Btw do you know about PerfView also?

Jetbrains make good tools (e.g. dotMemory, dotTrace).

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Thanks for sharing. I've always heard the industry wisdom that it's better to re-create a reliable L7 implementation over UDP for games, but I always wondered why. Now I know maybe it's just a cargo cult thing in some cases.

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Homepage - TinyFFR Manual

If it's 3D you're interested in I've been working on tinyffr.dev for a while now. Not a chud (as far as I'm aware 😅)

tinyffr.dev

This is the homepage/manual for Tiny FFR (C# Tiny Fixed Function Rendering Library).

Xenoprimate (Ben Bowen) @tinyffr.dev · 14/07/2026

I renamed some files in my unit test proj and updated to the latest .NET SDK. When I tried to run my tests, the CLR segfaulted. The crazy part? It wasn't the SDK update, the renaming of files changed the reflective type load order via NUnit, exposing a CLR bug. github.com/dotnet/runti... #dotnet

github.com

SIGSEGV in type loader when a struct wrapping a CRTP-constrained struct is loaded before its field type · Issue #130661 · dotnet/runtime

Description Loading Res before Wrapper avoids the crash entirely, so the failure is load-order dependent. Reproduces on Linux x64 on .NET 9.0.0 through 10.0.9. Real-world trigger: NUnit test discov...

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Xenoprimate (Ben Bowen) @tinyffr.dev · 12/07/2026

And here's the atlas my loader built in the background when loading the font! It uses R/G channel for the SDF data and a single tiny blue 3x3 square in the bottom which is used for a secondary background quad, used to multiply the background colour.

Xenoprimate (Ben Bowen) @tinyffr.dev · 12/07/2026

Huge progress adding text rendering to tinyffr.dev! Configurable background colour and outlining; built-in support for a decently large default char set; kerning, configurable font size or bounded width/height/both, horizontal + vertical justify, and (soon) camera-facing billboarding too! #dotnet

A screenshot of text being rendered in a 3D scene

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Xenoprimate (Ben Bowen) @tinyffr.dev · 19/06/2026

I love TC, he's one of my oldest Youtube subs!

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Xenoprimate (Ben Bowen) @tinyffr.dev · 19/06/2026

It's been a hot minute since I posted, but here's a working mutable vertex grid in TinyFFR -- fully CPU-controlled, dynamically updated every frame with texture colour and normalized heightmap writes! This will be enabled in v0.9 of tinyffr.dev :) #csharp #gamedev #rendering #dotnet #enginedev

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Xenoprimate (Ben Bowen) @tinyffr.dev · 03/06/2026

Claude tried to tell me I could rotate away inverted chirality in my mesh (opus 4.7 xhigh). I think senior/tech lead engineering roles are going to be safe for the foreseeable future at least :) #claude #llm #ai #programming

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Xenoprimate (Ben Bowen) @tinyffr.dev · 24/05/2026

I don't understand what you're saying. I've used both languages, Java is cool in that it allows wildcard syntax in generics, but: .NET supports other languages (e.g. F#), I don't understand what compile-time safety has to do with generics, and sourcegen preferred to reflection these days for AOT...

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Xenoprimate (Ben Bowen) @tinyffr.dev · 24/05/2026

Isn't a CEO the ultimate "measurer"? They're damn well not building anything and this behaviour sure isn't selling me on the company either, so...

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Xenoprimate (Ben Bowen) @tinyffr.dev · 11/05/2026

Excellent work! Really impressive speed at which you're making this all work too, I struggled for quite a while on the animation system in my library. 🙂

Xenoprimate (Ben Bowen) @tinyffr.dev · 11/05/2026

Just published to my blog for the first time in years: "Inspecting 3D objects (incl. gltf) with a 28-line C# script" benbowen.blog/post/inspect... #csharp #dotnet #enginedev #gamedev

benbowen.blog

Inspecting 3D objects (incl. gltf) with a 28-line C# script • Ben Bowen's Blog

Ben Bowen's Software Blog

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Xenoprimate (Ben Bowen) @tinyffr.dev · 03/05/2026

Damn! What was the underlying cause?

Xenoprimate (Ben Bowen) @tinyffr.dev · 17/04/2026

Next version of tinyffr.dev will have camera controllers; and for those I needed interpolation algorithms. Thus... Here's a C# cubic bezier implementation I just finished up! Proud of this one 🙂 #gamedev #enginedev #csharp #dotnet

A screenshot of some C# code implementing cubic bezier interpolation

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Greatly appreciate your thoughts; thank you!

Homepage - TinyFFR Manual

Thanks for the thorough answer! Regarding resource loading, what would simpler look like? If you have the time and inclination, I'd love to know whether you think tinyffr.dev could work for you (and/or why not). Either way, no pressure, I appreciate your thoughts so far!

tinyffr.dev

This is the homepage/manual for Tiny FFR (C# Tiny Fixed Function Rendering Library).

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Out of curiosity, what would your ideal 3D "engine" look like in comparison? What would less handhold-y look like? I'm asking as I'm a dev of a 3D rendering library; just curious to know what your ideal engine would be 🙂

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Xenoprimate (Ben Bowen) @tinyffr.dev · 12/04/2026

I hit it all the time getting it to do fairly technical-but-menial stuff (e.g. generating tests for my linear algebra classes); I'm using Opus with extra thinking though-- is that a point of difference? I do try and avoid wasting tokens too (i.e. giving it file paths so it doesn't use grep etc)

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I'm so fucking tired of hearing "it's our heritage!!!" as though it answers anything at all

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Xenoprimate (Ben Bowen) @tinyffr.dev · 10/04/2026

My Husky says "Dad, why are you still trying to make those stupid cubes render in different ways? Don't you know it's walkies time???"

A picture of a husky. Very floof. Much wow.

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Xenoprimate (Ben Bowen) @tinyffr.dev · 09/04/2026

Not stack-restricted; heap allocations are used but memory is pooled (retained) until the whole factory is disposed-- either in managed pools (e.g. ArrayPool<>) or in native alloc. If users end up boxing the given structs that's fine and up to them, but the lib design allows for fully GC-less use.

Xenoprimate (Ben Bowen) @tinyffr.dev · 09/04/2026

This is great, thank you! I'll take a look later this evening :). Also thanks for the tip regarding structs; I'm coming from C# thankfully and I've gone to great lengths to never box anything throughout the entire lib. The whole design is zero-GC.

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Xenoprimate (Ben Bowen) @tinyffr.dev · 09/04/2026

Yes, sorry. Been solo working on the project for a few years and not super hygienic with the branch structure. If you check out the latest tagged release (`v0.7.0`) everything should work.

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Xenoprimate (Ben Bowen) @tinyffr.dev · 08/04/2026

Yes but we can't have the plebs' lives improved; you see, us hard-working types know the value of hard work! Now excuse me while I sell more nebulous consultancy contracts via my father's company to my Bullingdon-club pals on taxpayer money.

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Reposted by Xenoprimate (Ben Bowen)

.NET @dot.net · 31/03/2026

Ever wish you could skip the engine bloat and just render the thing? TinyFFR gives .NET devs a fast path from blank project to real‑time 3D — with documentation that’s genuinely delightful. Ben Bowen tells the story behind it: buff.ly/3tBFlwa

A developer wearing headphones while listening to a podcast and coding.
text reads: From Zero to 3D: Ben Bowen on TinyFFR's Rapid .NET Rendering

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Xenoprimate (Ben Bowen) @tinyffr.dev · 31/03/2026

Ah sure, I was specifically referring to fixed-size buffers annotated with the `[InlineArray]` attribute in this case; may be a little niche but I still feel like it's a missed opportunity to not be able to instantiate these, well, uh, inline 😅.

Xenoprimate (Ben Bowen) @tinyffr.dev · 31/03/2026

Agreed. I'm just tired of collection syntax sugars, a lot of them feel half-baked. Inline-arrays still can't be initialized with `[1, 2, 3, 4]` even though that feels like it should work. Maybe it's my industry but I don't need to manually work with collections that much in the first place.

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Reposted by Xenoprimate (Ben Bowen)

Jamie Taylor @gaprogman.com · 24/03/2026

𝗣𝗼𝘀𝘁 𝟭 New episode: Ben Bowen on TinyFFR—from zero to 3D rendering in .NET 🎯 TinyFFR is a cross-platform library for .NET allowing developers to render 3D models. It fills a gap in the games development tools market: between 3D modelling and full game engines🧵

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Xenoprimate (Ben Bowen) @tinyffr.dev · 23/03/2026

Congrats. :) I know how hard this is as I just finished doing the same in my library (glTF/GLB support via assimp + skeletal vertex skinning support). Good luck!