Slow Board Game Progress

After looking at Win2D for a bit, I realized that it's perhaps not for me. I would need to learn quite a bit about how the Win2D API works, and it seems to be a bit slow to compile. I felt that I either had the choice of taking the easy Unity route or doing something more radical. I really do not want to have a Unity splash logo for something as simple as a board game, like the one I am currently making, "connect four". I knew from earlier about SDL since I had made an entire platformer gaming using it. Therefore, I decided to take my server-client game in C# and transform it into a DLL file (easy actually). Then I created a C++ project and imported the DLL file, the bad thing about this approach is that I have a setting in Visual Studio called crt. Having crt enables garbage collection for the DLL and makes it easy to access internal C# methods and classes with C++. However, crt supposedly also makes the application less optimized in terms of performance. For board games or simple applications, I strongly think that no one will notice though. So far everything is going fine, it is taking longer creating everything as well as the UI from scratch, but I am having a lot of fun coding it. More fun than I think I would have with doing things the easy way with Unity. Also, I plan to use Lua to load UI elements from a text file. Whenever I make edits to the text-file while the app is running, I will try to make it update the window for me. This way, I will be able to make edits to the UI in real-time so that I do not have to re-compile the program every time I want to visualize the changes I make to the code.