Self-contained/single-file mode is compatible with trimming and benefits from the work done to improve AOT story. As AOT binaries get smaller and ILLink's analy

Self-contained/single-file mode is compatible with trimming and benefits from the work done to improve AOT story. As AOT binaries get smaller and ILLink's analysis gets smarter, the single-file trimmed binaries will see a part of such improvements. The issue is that many GUI frameworks are not AOT-incompatible per se but rather trim-incompatible as they rely on reflection that is done in a way that is totally opaque to ILLink save for rooting everything. You can try the following publish option anyway, and in many instances it "just works" (assuming .NET 8 SDK): dotnet publish -o out -p:PublishSingleFile=true -p:PublishTrimmed=true Note: trimming was introduced in .NET 6, and NativeAOT was initially introduced in 7, so it had seen quite a bit of work to mature and improve by the time 8 shipped.