Back when we were getting ready to ship .NET Core 2.0, I wrote a blog post exploring some of the many performance improvements that had gone into it. I enjoyed putting it together so much and received such a positive response to the post that I did it again for .NET Core 2.1, a version for which performance was also a significant focus. With //build last week and .NET Core 3.0‘s release now on the horizon, I’m thrilled to have an opportunity to do it again. .NET Core 3.0 has a ton to offer, from Windows Forms and WPF, to single-file executables, to async enumerables, to platform intrinsics, to HTTP/2, to fast JSON reading and writing, to assembly unloadability, to enhanced cryptography, and on and on and on… there is a wealth of new functionality to get excited about. For me, however, performance is the primary feature that makes me excited to go to work in the morning, and there’s a staggering amount of performance goodness in .NET Core 3.0. In this post, we’ll take a tour through some of the many improvements, big and small, that have gone into the .NET Core runtime and core libraries in order to make your apps and services leaner and faster.
Setup
Benchmark.NET has become the preeminent tool for doing benchmarking of .NET libraries, and so as I did in my 2.1 post, I’ll use Benchmark.NET to demonstrate the improvements. Throughout the post, I’ll include the individual snippets of benchmarks that highlight the particular improvement being discussed. To be able to execute those benchmarks, you can use the following setup: 1. Ensure you have .NET Core 3.0 installed, as well as .NET Core 2.1 for comparison purposes. 2. Create a directory named BlogPostBenchmarks. 3. In that directory, run dotnet new console. 4. Replace the contents of BlogPostBenchmarks.csproj with the following:
<Project Sdk="Microsoft.NET.Sdk"> <PropertyGroup> <OutputType>Exe</OutputType> <AllowUnsafeBlocks>true</AllowUnsafeBlocks> <TargetFrameworks>netcoreapp2.1;netcoreapp3.0</TargetFrameworks> </PropertyGroup> <ItemGroup> <PackageReference Include="BenchmarkDotNet" Version="0.11.5" /> <PackageReference Include="System.Drawing.Common" Version="4.5.0" /> <PackageReference Include="System.IO.Pipelines" Version="4.5.0" /> <PackageReference Include="System.Threading.Channels" Version="4.5.0" /> </ItemGroup> </Project>- Replace the contents of Program.cs with the following:
using BenchmarkDotNet.Attributes; using BenchmarkDotNet.Configs; using BenchmarkDotNet.Jobs; using BenchmarkDotNet.Running; using BenchmarkDotNet.Toolchains.CsProj; using Microsoft.Win32.SafeHandles; using System; using System.Buffers; using System.Collections; using System.Collections.Concurrent; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Collections.Immutable; using System.Diagnostics; using System.Drawing; using System.Drawing.Drawing2D; using System.Globalization; using System.IO; using System.IO.Compression; using System.IO.Pipelines; using System.Linq; using System.Net; using System.Net.Http; using System.Net.NetworkInformation; using System.Net.Security; using System.Net.Sockets; using System.Runtime.CompilerServices; using System.Runtime.InteropServices; using System.Security.Authentication; using System.Security.Cryptography.X509Certificates; using System.Text; using