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Performance Improvements in .NET 10

devblogs.microsoft.com

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Re: Performance Improvements in .NET 10

#21

Post by rudedogg »

PaulHoule wrote: post #9

This kinda stuff brings languages like C# and Java closer to Rust in performance, thinking like the "borrow checker" it understands the scope of some objects and puts them on the stack and avoids garbage collection and allocation overhead. It keeps the unsung benefit of garbage collection for "programming in the large" in which memory allocation is treated as a global concern independent of everything else instead of…

This is wishful thinking. It’s the same as other layers we have like auto-vectorization where you don’t know if it’s working without performance analysis. The complexity compounds and reasoning about performance gets harder because the interactions get more complex with abstractions like these.

Also, the more I work with this stuff the more I think trying to avoid memory management is foolish. You end up having to think about it, even at the highest of levels like a React app. It takes some experience, but I’d rather just manage the memory myself and confront the issue from the start. It’s slower at first, but leads to better designs. And it’s simpler, you just have to do more work upfront.

Edit:

> Rust's strategy is problematic for code reuse just as C/C++'s strategy is problematic. Without garbage collection a library has to know how it fits into the memory allocation strategies of the application as a whole. In general a library doesn't know if the application still needs a buffer and the application doesn't know if the library needs it, but... the garbage collector does.

Should have noted that Zig solves this by making the convention be to pass an allocator in to any function that allocates. So the boundaries/responsibilities become very clear.

Re: Performance Improvements in .NET 10

#22

Post by [deleted] »

CyanLite2 wrote: post #6
Varelion wrote: post #3

If only they could fix the ecosystem's stability; I feel like anything written with C#'s staple packages becomes outdated considerably faster than any other options.

lol, whut? Microsoft created the ".NET Standard" for this. Literally anything that targets .NET Standard 1.0 should work from circa 2001 through modern day 2025. You still get the (perf) benefits up the runtime upgrade which is what the blog post is about.

[deleted]

Re: Performance Improvements in .NET 10

#23

Post by mrsmrtss »

PaulHoule wrote: post #12
Varelion wrote: post #3

If only they could fix the ecosystem's stability; I feel like anything written with C#'s staple packages becomes outdated considerably faster than any other options.

I haven't written C# professionally since the early 2010s but back then the language had a big problem in that the old Container classes were not compatible with the Container classes that were added when they added generics to C#. This created an ugly split in the ecosystem because if you were using Container you could not pass it to an old API that expected a Container. Java on the other hand had an implementation…

And yet, Java is trying desperately to fix its generics now with project Valhalla (although value types are their main goal), but it's almost impossible to do without major breaking changes. Without reified generics there's major performance cost when primitive (or value) types are used as generic parameters, because of boxing. Also, .NET has had generics since 2005 when .NET Framework 2.0 was released.

Re: Performance Improvements in .NET 10

#24

Post by SkiFire13 »

PaulHoule wrote: post #9

This kinda stuff brings languages like C# and Java closer to Rust in performance, thinking like the "borrow checker" it understands the scope of some objects and puts them on the stack and avoids garbage collection and allocation overhead. It keeps the unsung benefit of garbage collection for "programming in the large" in which memory allocation is treated as a global concern independent of everything else instead of…

> thinking like the "borrow checker" it understands the scope of some objects and puts them on the stack and avoids garbage collection and allocation overhead.

On the other side however if you don't write code that the borrow checker would accept you likely won't get these optimizations. And even if it was accepted there's a chance the analysis needs to be too deep or complex for the escape analysis to work. Ultimately this is a nice speed up in practice but not something I would rely on.

Re: Performance Improvements in .NET 10

#25

Post by bob1029 »

rudedogg wrote: post #21
PaulHoule wrote: post #9

This kinda stuff brings languages like C# and Java closer to Rust in performance, thinking like the "borrow checker" it understands the scope of some objects and puts them on the stack and avoids garbage collection and allocation overhead. It keeps the unsung benefit of garbage collection for "programming in the large" in which memory allocation is treated as a global concern independent of everything else instead of…

This is wishful thinking. It’s the same as other layers we have like auto-vectorization where you don’t know if it’s working without performance analysis. The complexity compounds and reasoning about performance gets harder because the interactions get more complex with abstractions like these. Also, the more I work with this stuff the more I think trying to avoid memory management is foolish. You end up having to th…

Use of a GC does not imply we are trying to avoid memory management or no longer have a say in how memory is utilized. Getting sweaty chasing around esoteric memory management strategies leads to poor designs, not good ones.

Re: Performance Improvements in .NET 10

#26

Post by bob1029 »

homebrewer wrote: post #10
Varelion wrote: post #3

If only they could fix the ecosystem's stability; I feel like anything written with C#'s staple packages becomes outdated considerably faster than any other options.

TBH aspnet core has been the most stable web framework I've worked in my life. If you have good test coverage, upgrading projects between major versions often takes minutes — because nothing, or almost nothing, gets broken. Some things might get deprecated, but the old way keeps working for years, you can chip away at it slowly over the next year or two. You still need to make sure that everything works, but that's w…

I've hedged the stability risk by using the narrowest possible slice of the framework.

With enough experience you can accomplish pretty much everything using just the minimal API and router. HttpContext is the heart of AspNetCore. If you can get your hands on instances of it within the appropriate application context, you can do anything you need to. Everything else is dependent upon this. The chances that HttpContext can be screwed with are very, very low. There are billions of dollars riding on the fact that this type & API remains stable for the next decade+.

Re: Performance Improvements in .NET 10

#27

Post by sidkshatriya »

Now if only they could bring their focus on performance to windows 11 as a whole.

It’s just shocking how much faster vanilla Linux is compared to vanilla windows 11.

Edit: by vanilla Linux I mean out of the box installation of your typical distribution e.g. Ubuntu without any explicit optimisation or tuning for performance

Re: Performance Improvements in .NET 10

#28

Post by tracker1 »

homebrewer wrote: post #10
Varelion wrote: post #3

If only they could fix the ecosystem's stability; I feel like anything written with C#'s staple packages becomes outdated considerably faster than any other options.

TBH aspnet core has been the most stable web framework I've worked in my life. If you have good test coverage, upgrading projects between major versions often takes minutes — because nothing, or almost nothing, gets broken. Some things might get deprecated, but the old way keeps working for years, you can chip away at it slowly over the next year or two. You still need to make sure that everything works, but that's w…

I saw a lot of breaks between .Net Core 1, 2 and 3... since 3 it's been much more steady though.

Re: Performance Improvements in .NET 10

#29

Post by andix »

verdie-g wrote: post #18
andix wrote: post #13

Whenever I read about those yearly performance improvements, I wonder if there are some real world benchmarks. Some applications that were benchmarked on all .NET versions up from Framework 4.7 as a baseline. And all the .NET versions since as a comparison.

In my company running maybe 20K servers on .NET, we get a 10-20% CPU decrease every time we upgrade to the next major.

That's impressive, considering a major release is sniped every year. I've never thought it would be that much of an improvement outside of synthetic benchmarks.

Re: Performance Improvements in .NET 10

#30

Post by tracker1 »

sidkshatriya wrote: post #27

Now if only they could bring their focus on performance to windows 11 as a whole. It’s just shocking how much faster vanilla Linux is compared to vanilla windows 11. Edit: by vanilla Linux I mean out of the box installation of your typical distribution e.g. Ubuntu without any explicit optimisation or tuning for performance

What is "vanilla Linux"? Ubuntu+Gnome, Mint+Cinnamon, Fedora+KDE, Arch+COSMIC ..?

Each distro, platform and desktop manager and related apps are relatively different, though all work pretty well on modern hardware. I'm currently running PopOS COSMIC alpha with the 6.16-4 kernel via mainline. It's been pretty good, though there have been many rough edges regarding keyboard navigation/support in the new apps.

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