| .NET 9 Released |
| Written by Kay Ewbank |
| Monday, 18 November 2024 |
|
.NET 9 has been released with a number of performance improvements and new features designed to help developers use AI.
.NET was created from a combination of .NET Framework and .NET Core. This release adds support for new hardware including Arm64 SVE and Intel AVX10. RyuJIT ( the .NET just-in-time compiler) improves performance for Arm64, loops, PGO, and bounds checks. Microsoft says exceptions are 50% faster, due to adopting the same exception model used by Native AOT. Dynamic Profile Guided Optimization (PGO) has also been updated to optimize more code patterns. Dynamic PGO enables the JIT to profile code and make use of that profiling to generate more efficient code. Writing about the improvements, the .NET team said: "The JIT now generates fast-path code for both common and unseen type casts in an application. Casts, like (IFoo)myFoo and myFoo is IFoo are very common in C#. It can also unroll and vectorize some operations on buffers for common buffer lengths it observes. This change results in 70% faster execution, although requires ReadyToRun to be disabled." LINQ has also been optimized so that methods such as Take and DefaultIfEmpty now return up to ten times faster when the underlying array, collection, or enumerable is empty. The release also has new features for "building and infusing applications with AI". These range from new learning materials and samples to collaborations with partners to make their AI products available. Microsoft says it has worked with partners including Azure, OpenAI, LlamaIndex, Qdrant, Pinecone, Milvus, AutoGen, OllamaSharp, and ONNX Runtime. In more practical terms, this means developers can make use of smart components from Semantic Kernel in the Microsoft.Extensions.AI and Microsoft.Extensions.VectorData. These provide a unified layer of C# abstractions for interacting with AI services, such as small and large language models (SLMs and LLMs), embeddings, vector stores, and middleware. Microsoft has also improved other libraries and primitive types. Microsoft.ML.Tokenizers has improved tokenizer improvements for popular model families including GPT (4,o1,etc), Llama, Phi, and Bert in addition to new support for tokenization algorithms including Byte-Level BPE, SentencePiece, and WordPiece. Tensor has also been improved with a new type to represent multidimensional data to simplify interop between libraries and applying operations. GitHub Copilot has also been improved for .NET developers, with a new AI smart variable inspection, and an AI-powered LINQ Editable Expressions in the IEnumerable visualizer. The updated version also offers better AI completions for C# by bringing in additional context from relevant source files to improve completions for C#. .NET 9 is available for download now.
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