Microsoft Releases .NET 5.0 With Many Performance Improvements, Continued Linux Work

Microsoft on Tuesday released .NET 5.0 as their latest work on unifying their .NET stack and continuing along with support for Linux and other non-Windows platforms.

".NET 5.0 is the first release in our .NET unification journey. We built .NET 5.0 to enable a much larger group of developers to migrate their .NET Framework code and apps to .NET 5.0. We’ve also done much of the early work in 5.0 so that Xamarin developers can use the unified .NET platform when we release .NET 6.0," noted Microsoft .NET Team Program Manager Richard Lander in the release announcement.

Among the changes to find with .NET 5.0 include the likes of:

- Many performance improvements across the numerous .NET 5.0 components, including the .NET libraries. The P95 latency is also lower thanks to various optimizations.

- C# 9 and F# 5 language improvements.

- Windows Arm64 and WebAssembly platform support. The Arm64 code for .NET 5.0 should be performing much faster as well thanks to tuned JIT optimizations and other capabilities added.

- Support for ICU on Windows, using the same ICU Unicode library as previously used on the Linux and macOS builds is now also used on Windows.

- Expanded Linux/macOS support with features like System.DirectoryServices.Protocols now being supported.

- Improved JSON support with a "significantly improved" System.Text.Json implementation.

More details on the big Microsoft .NET 5.0 release via devblogs.microsoft.com.