What’s new in Microsoft .NET 5

.NET 5 brings improvements to RyuJIT code quality, garbage collection, and JSON serialisation, for starters

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Microsoft has published a third preview of .NET 5. A merger of .NET Framework and .NET Core that is intended to unify the .NET platform, .NET 5 is described by Microsoft as “the future of .NET.” The second .NET 5 preview, released 2 April, brings additional code quality improvements to the Ryujit compiler as well as garbage collection enhancements.

High-level goals for .NET 5 include providing a unified .NET SDK experience, with a single BCL (base class library) across all .NET 5 applications, and support for both native and web applications across multiple operating systems. For native development, a single device project would support an application to work across devices such as Windows, Microsoft Duo (Android), and Apple iOS using native controls on those platforms.

High-performance cloud applications are a goal as well, as are faster algorithms in the BCL, better support for containers in the runtime, and support for HTTP3.

Enhancements in .NET 5 preview 3 include the following: 

• The BitArray class for managing an array of bit values was updated to include a hardware-accelerated implementation for ARM64 using ARM64 intrinsics. BitArray performance improvements are significant, Microsoft said. In addition, On Stack replacement (OSR) in the CLR was implemented to allow code executed by currently running methods to be changed in the middle of method execution, while those methods are active “on stack.” This capability, to improve performance characteristics of tiered compilation, is now an experimental, opt-in feature on x64. Another enhancement for RyuJIT improves code quality for structs as arguments in “tail call” position calls. RyuJIT also is expected to offer better performance of generics. 
• The addition of support for preserving references was added to System.Txt.Json, enabling reference loop handling for JSON serialisation. Also, immutable classes and structs are now supported for JsonSerializer. Also supported now is null value handling.
• The .NET SDK now will auto-reference the NETFramework.ReferenceAssemblies NuGet package given a .NET Framework target framework in a project file. This change enables the building of .NET Framework projects on a machine without a .NET Framework targeting pack installed. This improvement is specific to targeting packs and does not account for other possible project dependencies.

Specific enhancements in .NET 5 preview 2, released 2 April, included: 

• A number of changes have been made to RyuJIT to improve the quality of the machine code generated, including duplicate zero initialisations being eliminated more aggressively and nullable box optimisations invoked earlier.
• Server garbage collection on different threads now can work-steal while marking gen0/1 objects held live by older generation objects. Work stealing across threads shortens ephemeral GC pauses for scenarios where some GC threads took much longer to mark than others. In addition, part of the Pinned Object Heap (POH) feature has been implemented, the part internal to garbage collection, to allow the collector to manage pinned objects separately. This avoids the negative effects of pinned objects on generational heaps.

Preview 1, released 16 March, included regular expression performance improvements as well as code quality enhancements in RyuJIT.

Due as a production release in November 2020, .NET 5 is set to include:

• ASP.NET Core, an open source framework for web applications.
• Entity Framework Core data access technology.
• WinForms.
• WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation).
• Xamarin mobile app device model.
• ML.NET.

Microsoft is offering a preview .NET 5 SDK and an accompanying runtime preview. Microsoft said that .NET 5 will provide a single, unified platform for building any type of application. The company is directing half of the traffic to its .NET website traffic to a .NET 5 version as a test case, using Azure load-balancing. 

Microsoft recommends that developers build new applications with .NET Core 3.1 and then migrate them to .NET 5. The company noted that .NET Framework applications can be left on .NET Framework, which will remain supported for as long as Windows itself is supported.

IDG News Service

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