Announcing .NET Core 2.1

This is a landmark release for .NET.<p>The most important since at least framework 4.0 maybe even 3.0.<p>We are getting:<p>- Span&lt;T&gt;&#x2F;Memory&lt;T&gt; : A 0-copy, unified way of accessing Managed or Unmanaged memory.<p>- Channel&lt;T&gt; : High performance thread-safe queues (like go channels)<p>- Pipelines : an async, 0-copy version of Stream<p>- In-box support for Array&#x2F;Buffer pooling (finally!) (MemoryPool, ArrayPool)<p>- Better primitives for pointer manipulation and memory marshaling. (MemoryMarshal)<p>- New primitives for high performance parsers and formatters (System.Buffers.Binary and System.Buffers.Text)<p>- Improved support for SSE&#x2F;NEON via Vector&lt;T&gt;<p>- Microsoft.Windows.Compatibility : Windows specific APIs on .NET Core (Registry, EventLog, NamedPipes...)<p>- Tiered Compilation<p>- Faster tooling<p>- Wider Platform support<p>If you write code on .NET, you should [Edit] evaluate this release with to see if it fits your business needs [&#x2F;Edit]<p>Doubly so if you care about runtime performance.

This does not mention my favorite new feature: BindingFlags.DoNotWrapExceptions. It lets you prevent exceptions from being wrapped in TargetInvocationException when invoking methods using reflection. I wrote about this feature here if anyone is interested: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.awise.us&#x2F;2018&#x2F;04&#x2F;25&#x2F;do-no-wrap-exceptions.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.awise.us&#x2F;2018&#x2F;04&#x2F;25&#x2F;do-no-wrap-exceptions.html</a>

Just a reminder, telemetry is opt-out: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17177241" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17177241</a><p>Be sure to check your environment variables are set properly. Also, be sure to check that they haven&#x27;t added additional opt-out settings, or remove the ability to opt-out all together. If you haven&#x27;t opted-out on purpose, be sure you&#x27;re still OK with what they&#x27;re collecting.

Humble request: can anyone explain whether or not Span&lt;T&gt; is interesting if you mostly work with application code (as opposed to, say, low-level or framework code) and never work with unmanaged&#x2F;native code, and why?<p>From my perspective, it seems like something that&#x27;ll be used in the guts of ASP.NET and the rest of the base class library that will benefit the performance of my code, but I&#x27;d never really use it directly.

Is there any data on the size of the .NET Core user base? It was my impression that .NET Core was unsuitable for production deployments so far. Also, .NET Core is primarily targeted at Linux users, right? Why would you even consider using .NET Core on Windows when you can utilize a fully featured .NET Framework?

Anxious to finally play with this, been wanting the full library&#x2F;stack update for span&lt;t&gt;&#x2F;memory&lt;t&gt; to get a feel for actually using them to optimize code.

I&#x27;m most excited about the added SourceLink support. This will allow us to see and navigate library sources right in the IDE and also allow us to step through library code when debugging.

I wonder if it was on purpose or accident that the LTS release of .NET Core coincides with the LTS release of Ubuntu...

One benefit caught my eye, but was not explained:<p>&quot;Much easier to manage platform dependencies in project files and with self-contained application publishing.&quot;<p>Anybody know anything about this? I frequently deal with applications that have platform specific components, and it&#x27;s a real pain. Sometimes the platform specific code is a platform-specific native dll that gets called from the same P&#x2F;Invoke wrapper, sometimes it&#x27;s two different managed implementations of the same interface, sometimes it&#x27;s both. It&#x27;d be great if this sort of thing got easier to do.

And I just realise, .Net Core is MIT licensed..... that is far too good to be true right?<p>Given the immense engineering hours went into CoreCLR, why aren&#x27;t more languages built on top of .NET runtime?

Does anyone else experience high CPU on mac when running dotnet run?

Any idea about required VS versions? The announcement makes no mention of Visual Studio (or maybe I missed it?) but the download pages says it requires a preview version of VS2017 which is unfortunate.

What is the difference between Core and Framework?

Where is the source for this or is it not up yet? Jones&#x27;n to dive into Channel&lt;T&gt; to see what&#x27;s going on in there.

Anybody knows how much improvement can you expect from tiered compilation? And are there any drawbacks - is it stable?