Microsoft releases .NET 6 with massive gains in performance and improved ARM support

Along with the release of Visual Studio 2022, Microsoft yesterday announced the release of .NET 6. .NET 6 comes with significant performance improvements, improved ARM support on both Windows and Mac, new dynamic profile-guided optimization (PGO) system, new APIs and more.

.NET 6 Highlights:

• Production stress-tested with Microsoft services, cloud apps run by other companies, and open source projects.
• Supported for three years as the latest long term support (LTS) release.
• Unified platform across browser, cloud, desktop, IoT, and mobile apps, all using the same .NET Libraries and the ability to share code easily.
• Performance is greatly improved across the board and for file I/O in particular, which together result in decreased execution time, latency, and memory use.
• C# 10 offers language improvements such as record structs, implicit using, and new lambda capabilities, while the compiler adds incremental source generators. F# 6 adds new features including Task based async, pipeline debugging and numerous performance improvements.
• Visual Basic has improvements in the Visual Studio experience and for Windows Forms project open experience.
• Hot Reload enables you to skip rebuilding and restarting your app to view a new change — while your app is running — supported in Visual Studio 2022 and from the .NET CLI, for C# and Visual Basic.
• Cloud diagnostics have been improved with OpenTelemetry and dotnet monitor, which is now supported in production and available with Azure App Service.
• JSON APIs are more capable and have higher performance with a source generator for the serializer.
• Minimal APIs introduced in ASP.NET Core to simplify the getting started experience and improve the performance of HTTP services.
• Blazor components can now be rendered from JavaScript and integrated with existing JavaScript based apps.
• WebAssembly AOT compilation for Blazor WebAssembly (Wasm) apps, as well as support for runtime relinking and native dependencies.
• Single-page apps built with ASP.NET Core now use a more flexible pattern that can be used with Angular, React, and other popular frontend JavaScript frameworks.
• HTTP/3 has been added so that ASP.NET Core, HttpClient, and gRPC can all interact with HTTP/3 clients and servers.
• File IO now has support for symbolic links and has greatly improved performance with a re-written-from-scratch FileStream.
• Security has been improved with support for OpenSSL 3, the ChaCha20Poly1305 encryption scheme, and runtime defense-in-depth mitigations, specifically W^X and CET.
• Single-file apps (extraction-free) can be published for Linux, macOS, and Windows (previously only Linux).
• IL trimming is now more capable and effective, with new warnings and analyzers to ensure correct final results.
• Source generators and analyzers have been added that help you produce better, safer, and higher performance code.
• Source build enables organizations like Red Hat to build .NET from source and offer their own builds to their users.

You can download .NET 6 for Linux, macOS, and Windows.

Source: Microsoft