Media engine part of the library has 45k lines of code, this is mostly due to the complexity of V4L2 API, and of the MKV and Mpeg4 containers. I wouldn’t call that “simple stuff”.

> you really do need to dynamically allocate and free memory

Memory allocation in .NET ain’t limited to GC.

First of all there’s stack. I use Spans + stackalloc in quite a few places there. Modern .NET even has these `ref structs` where the compiler guarantees they are never accidentally boxed into the heap.

Another thing, no one stops you from using malloc/free, like I did in that class: https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac/blob/master/VrmacVideo/Aud...

Finally, the mere presence of GC doesn’t affect performance in any way, only usage of GC does. Even for latency-sensitive applications like that media engine it’s OK to allocate stuff on managed heap, as long as it only happens on startup, or otherwise rarely. I allocate quite a lot of stuff on the heap, megabytes, when opening a media file.