KernelEngine

KernelEngine is a microkernel game engine: ABI-stable C contracts, Zig plugins behind them, and a managed C# layer for game code. Every capability is a plugin behind a vtable contract, and a plugin exports one factory per header. Because the contracts are plain C, any language that can call C can reach the ECS, the renderer or the framework the same way.

Layers

layer	where	holds
1, C contracts	src/c/<domain>/kernel_engine/<domain>/	vtable shapes, parameter structs, enums; headers only
2, plugins	src/zig/<domain>/<plugin>/	every implementation, one shared library each
3, C# bindings	src/csharp/<domain>/*/Native/Generated/	P/Invoke surface generated from the headers
4, C# managed	src/csharp/<domain>/KernelEngine.*/	wrappers, framework, game code

Requirements

• Zig 0.16.
• .NET 10.

Build and test

Native (Zig and vcpkg):

zig build --prefix build/native --global-cache-dir build/zig-global
zig build test --prefix build/native --global-cache-dir build/zig-global

Managed (.NET):

dotnet build
dotnet test KernelEngine.slnx

Run a first example

A C example is built with the native tree:

build/native/bin/c_demo_01

The smallest C# host is 00_runtime_minimal. It registers the ECS, the task pool, the runtime and a window module, loads the modules and ticks the loop.

dotnet run --project examples/csharp/00_runtime_minimal

More examples are under examples/c and examples/csharp.

Contributing

• Read CLAUDE.md for the build, the layer rules and the coding conventions.
• Work reaches main as described in Git.
• Commits follow Conventional Commits, one per logical task.
• Documents are written to Documentation.
• scripts/verify.cs runs the gates that check the rules a machine can check.