Stephen Toub

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Performance Improvements in .NET 5

July 13th, 2020

Explore many performance improvements, big and small, that have gone into the .NET 5 runtime and core libraries to make apps and services leaner and faster.

Regex Performance Improvements in .NET 5

April 2nd, 2020

For .NET 5, we’ve invested in some significant improvements to the Regex engine. On many of the expressions we’ve tried, these changes routinely result in throughput improvements of 3-6x, and in some cases, much more. In this post, I’ll walk through some of the myriad of changes that have gone into System.Text.RegularExpressions in .NET 5.

Async ValueTask Pooling in .NET 5

March 16th, 2020

The async/await feature in C# has revolutionized how developers targeting .NET write asynchronous code. Sprinkle some async and await around, change some return types to be tasks, and badda bing badda boom, you've got an asynchronous implementation. In theory. In practice, obviously I've exaggerated the ease with which a codebase can be made ...

ConfigureAwait FAQ

December 11th, 2019

.NET added async/await to the languages and libraries over seven years ago. In that time, it's caught on like wildfire, not only across the .NET ecosystem, but also being replicated in a myriad of other languages and frameworks. It's also seen a ton of improvements in .NET, in terms of additional language constructs that utilize asynchrony, ...

An Introduction to System.Threading.Channels

December 11th, 2019

"Producer/consumer" problems are everywhere, in all facets of our lives. A line cook at a fast food restaurant, slicing tomatoes that are handed off to another cook to assemble a burger, which is handed off to a register worker to fulfill your order, which you happily gobble down. Postal drivers delivering mail all along their routes, and you ...

Performance Improvements in .NET Core 3.0

May 15th, 2019

Take a tour through some of the many improvements, big and small, that have gone into the .NET Core 3.0 runtime and core libraries to make apps and services leaner and faster.

Understanding the Whys, Whats, and Whens of ValueTask

November 7th, 2018

The .NET Framework 4 saw the introduction of the System.Threading.Tasks namespace, and with it the Task class. This type and the derived Task<TResult> have long since become a staple of .NET programming, key aspects of the asynchronous programming model introduced with C# 5 and its async / await keywords. In this post, I'll ...

Performance Improvements in .NET Core 2.1

April 18th, 2018

Back before .NET Core 2.0 shipped, I wrote a post highlighting various performance improvements in .NET Core 2.0 when compared with .NET Core 1.1 and the .NET Framework. As .NET Core 2.1 is in its final stages of being released, I thought it would be a good time to have some fun and take a tour through some of the myriad of performance ...

Performance Improvements in .NET Core

June 7th, 2017

Update (2017/06/12): Added BenchmarkDotNet blog post link. There are many exciting aspects to .NET Core (open source, cross platform, x-copy deployable, etc.) that have been covered in posts on this blog before. To me, though, one of the most exciting aspects of .NET Core is performance. There's been a lot of discussion about the ...

Partner Software Engineer, .NET