> You should be able to compile a relatively small, trimmed, standalone, AOT compiled library

Yes-ish. We do AOT at work on a fairly large app and keep tripping over corners. Admittedly we don't use COM. I believe if you know the objects you are using upfront then code generation will take care of this for you. The other options are:

- self-contained: this just means "compiler puts a copy of the runtime alongside your executable". Works fine, at the cost of tens of megabytes

- self-contained single file: the above, but the runtime is zipped into the executable. May unpack into a temporary directory behind the scenes. Slightly easier to handle, minor startup time cost.