Slower I can understand, but I don't see how a C# interface could possibly be inherently more complicated than a C or C++ interface for something like an image library, at least to the extent you're implying.

Even hardware interfacing via memory mapped addresses would just need a small shim and types that are byte compatible with C structs you can call via P/invoke, isn't particularly complicated.

Can you give a specific example of what you're referring to?

Poor wording in my part. It's not that the interfaces are more complicated, it's the implementation of those interfaces. Some of the hardware pieces come along with native SDK's (those which don't support e.g. a serial interface), so there's a lot of interop going on.

Right, so the complication is just duplicating the interface in C# for interop, which obviously isn't needed if you just use the SDK language. Still, this just hides the complexities of using that language, like memory safety and garbage collection, so it seems hard to definitively state that it's more complicated than it otherwise would be.

What sort of performance issues do you see? Do you mean the p/invoke/marshalling costs?

The complications are around all of the native interop. It's just a lot of PInvoke and type wrangling scattered about for no good reason.

The performance issues were in the image processing and analysis areas. Image analysis doesn't really lend itself to bounds checking, non-deterministic memory usage, little control over heap allocated memory, etc. Also, I lose access to some of the most powerful imaging libraries out there.

I can work around a lot of it, but why should I have to? Should have used the right tool from the start.

You can circumvent the bounds checking via unsafe code, and avoid heap allocation by using structs. Not sure what non-deterministic memory usage means.

You haven't specified what the right tool is. I think classifying C/C++ as the right tool is contentious too for the reasons I outline. The "type wrangling" isn't there for no good reason, the reasons are quite clear: to maintain memory safety and benefit from automatic memory management. There's also the possibility that you're making it more complicated than it needs to be.