We have seen improvements in the past half a decade in .NET in terms of functionality and performance, along with a few other components. Microsoft has been creating new possibilities repeatedly, which brings us to an almost new face of .NET after seeing performance improvements in .NET 6.
A year before the Dotnet runtime repository forked away from its main branch, 550 pull requests were considered while creating an entirely new system in the form of an important and massive update.
We can say that with the new update to .NET 6, there is nothing a developer cannot do with this platform. To give you an overview, there is JiT, which was an unexpected addition. Just-in-Time compiler provides inlining system forwarding a major benefit to the developer in terms of optimizations.
Just like this, there are several amazing and crucial additions to .NET 6 features that we are going to discuss in the sections below.
Overview of Major Performance Improvements in .NET 6
#1. JiT
Continuing from our discussion on using the JiT compiler in .NET above, understand that code compilation is the core of every application or digital solution ever built. So, an improvement in the code generation has a multiplier effect on the entire code structure. This includes the ability to improve performance, speed, testing, security, etc.
With the changes in the core structure with the new update, developers will benefit from inlining and the devirtualization process. With inlining, the caller enables the code to be deployed directly into the caller. This saves the time and effort required to direct the call through an overhead, but this is a minor benefit. More importantly, this system shares the content of the callee to the caller enabling subsequent or technically called “knock-on” optimizations.
The devirtualization works along with inlining providing better optimizations. With devirtualization, the JiT takes a virtual or an interface method call and statistically identifies the end target of the call. Doing so saves the time required to approach the target directly and saves the cost required for virtual dispatch. With the devirtualization complete, the target is considered inlined.
Furthermore, the revamped JiT structure translates the intermediate language directly into the assembly code at run time. Through this, it is also used as an ahead-of-time compilation, which is a part of the CrossGen2 code optimization system and is deployed in the Ready to Run (R2R) format.
#2. Changes to the System Types
The system-oriented changes in the .NET system have a wide-reaching impact. In other words, some changes at the foundational aspects of the system can go a long way in improving the overall performance and structure.
One of the prime examples of these changes is Guid. Guid is one of the .NET features used to provide unique identifiers. These can be for any number of things and operations.
Developers need to create these operations quickly and parse, format, and refine them with the same speed.
Another subtle but important update here is that the Guid.NewGuid can be used on macOS. Earlier, this was not an option on macOS systems due to performance issues. Development for macOS-related solutions were implemented using data read from /dev/urandom, which provided the same cryptographic entropy.
Now, the Guid.NewGuid component returns the same cryptographically strong random-bits by using the CCRandomGenerateBytes.
Among other minor improvements, we have a new System.Text JSON source code generator system that secures to boost performance. Also, the FileStream has been rewritten, leading to fixing the previous I/O performance issues.
#3. Transport Layer Security
With the new updates to the TLS component, now it can build secure connections even for a Linux-based solution, which was not possible earlier. Furthermore, by giving support to Linux, the TLS can shorten the time required to create secure connections, speeding up the transactions and processes. Lastly, it can enable a more aggressive way of using spans in the implementation cycle of BigInteger.
#4. Collections and LINQ
What’s great about this component is that in every release of .NET, there have been some improvements in collection types and LINQ. From time to time, it has become faster and better than before.
These improvements are deployed with changes to the Dictionary<TKey, TValue> as they are used on multiple occasions for performance improvement.
In another case, loading data from a database, file storage, or an API to store, forward, present, and manipulate the end-users has improved. This is because, among changes in .NET features, improvements to these underlying processes can provide great results.
Original source : An Itinerary of Performance Improvements in .NET 6