There are some benchmark games that I relied on in the past as a quick check and saw it as underwelming vs rust/c++.
For example:
https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...
We see that the fastest C# version is 6 times slower than the rust/c++ implementation.
But that's super deceiving because those versions use arena allocators. Doing the same (wrote this morning, actually) yielded a ~20% difference vs the fastest rust implementation.
This was with dotnet 9.
I think the model of using GC by default and managing the memory when it's important is the sanest approach. Requiring everything to be manually managed seems like a waste of time. C# is perfect for managing memory when you need it only.
I like rust syntactically. I think C# is too object-oriented. But with a very solid standard lib, practical design, good tools, and speed when you need it, C# remains super underrated.
> The fact that Rico Mariani was able to do a literal translation of the original C++ version into C# and blow the socks off it is a testament to the power and performance of managed code. It took me several days of painful optimization to catch up, including one optimization that introduced a bug, and then Rico simply had to do a little tweaking with one hand tied behind his back to regain the lead. Sure, I eventually won but look at the cost of that victory
It more or less tells you to unlearn all functional and OOP patterns for code that needs to be fast. Just use regular loops, structs and mutable variables.
Try looking at the "transliterated line-by-line literal" programs:
https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...
> But that's super deceiving because …
… that's labelled [ Contentious. Different approaches. ]
Try removing line 11 from
https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...
Imagine if we had something with rust syntax but csharp’s support and memory management trade off with escape hatch
It keeps the unsung benefit of garbage collection for "programming in the large" in which memory allocation is treated as a global concern independent of everything else instead of a global concern that has to be managed locally in every line of code.
Rust's strategy is problematic for code reuse just as C/C++'s strategy is problematic. Without garbage collection a library has to know how it fits into the memory allocation strategies of the application as a whole. In general a library doesn't know if the application still needs a buffer and the application doesn't know if the library needs it, but... the garbage collector does.
Sure you can "RC all the things" but then you might as well have a garbage collector.
In the Java world we are still waiting for
On the other side however if you don't write code that the borrow checker would accept you likely won't get these optimizations. And even if it was accepted there's a chance the analysis needs to be too deep or complex for the escape analysis to work. Ultimately this is a nice speed up in practice but not something I would rely on.
Early this year my son was playing chess which motivated me to write a chess program. I wrote one in Python really quickly that could challenge him. I was thinking of writing one I could bring to the chess club which would have had to have respected time control and with threads in Java this would have been a lot easier. I was able to get the inner loop to generate very little garbage in terms of move generation and search and evaluation with code that was only slightly stilted. To get decent play though I would have needed transposition table that were horribly slow using normal Java data structures but it could have been done off heap with something that would have looked nice on the outside but done it the way C would have done it in the inside.
I gave up because my son gave up on chess and started building and playing guitars in all his spare time.
Chess is a nice case of specialized programming where speed matters and it is branchy and not numeric.
Also, the more I work with this stuff the more I think trying to avoid memory management is foolish. You end up having to think about it, even at the highest of levels like a React app. It takes some experience, but I’d rather just manage the memory myself and confront the issue from the start. It’s slower at first, but leads to better designs. And it’s simpler, you just have to do more work upfront.
Edit:
> Rust's strategy is problematic for code reuse just as C/C++'s strategy is problematic. Without garbage collection a library has to know how it fits into the memory allocation strategies of the application as a whole. In general a library doesn't know if the application still needs a buffer and the application doesn't know if the library needs it, but... the garbage collector does.
Should have noted that Zig solves this by making the convention be to pass an allocator in to any function that allocates. So the boundaries/responsibilities become very clear.
Reasoning about performance is hard as it is, given nondeterministic optimisations by the CPU. Furthermore, a program that's optimal for one implementation of an Aarch64 architecture can be far from optimal for a different implementation of the same architecture. Because of that, reasoning deeply about micro-optimisations can be counterproductive, as your analysis today could be outdated tomorrow (or on a different vendor's chip). Full low-level control is helpful when you have full knowledge of the exact environment, including hardware details, and may be harmful otherwise.
What is meant by "performance" is also subjective. Improving average performance and improving worst-case performance are not the same thing. Also, improving the performance of the most efficient program possible and improving the performance of the program you are likely to write given your budget aren't the same thing.
For example, it may be the case that using a low-level language would yield a faster program given virtually unlimited resources, yet a higher-level language with less deterministic optimisation would yield a faster program if you have a more limited budget. Put another way, it may be cheaper to get to 100% of the maximal possible performance in language A, but cheaper to get to 97% with language B. If you don't need more than 97%, language B is the "faster language" from your perspective, as the programs you can actually afford to write will be faster.
> Also, the more I work with this stuff the more I think trying to avoid memory management is foolish.
It's not about avoiding thinking about memory management but about finding good memory management algorithms for your target definition of "good". Tracing garbage collectors offer a set of very attractive algorithms that aren't always easy to match (when it comes to throughput, at least, and in some situations even latency) and offer a knowb that allows you to trade footprint for speed. More manual memory management, as well as refcounting collectors often tend to miss the sweet spot, as they have a tendency for optimising for footprint over throughput. See this great talk about the RAM/CPU tradeoff - https://youtu.be/mLNFVNXbw7I from this year's ISMM (International Symposium on Memory Management); it focuses on tracing collectors, but the point applies to all memory management solutions.
> Should have noted that Zig solves this by making the convention be to pass an allocator in to any function that allocates. So the boundaries/responsibilities become very clear.
Yes, and arenas may give such usage patterns a similar CPU/RAM knob to tracing collectors, but this level of control isn't free. In the end you have to ask yourself if what you're gaining is worth the added effort.
> Also, the more I work with this stuff the more I think trying to avoid memory management is foolish ... It takes some experience, but I’d rather just manage the memory myself and confront the issue from the start.
Not sure why you're getting downvoted, this is a reasonable take on the matter.
Languages like C++ give you a tonne of options here, from passing in scratch buffers to libraries, passing in reusable containers, move semantics, to type erased primitives like std::memory_resource and std::shared_ptr
This is only being compared to last year's v9, but if you compare against v7 from a couple of years ago, the changes are huge.
And this only reflects the changes to the underlying framework compilation, and doesn't factor in changes to say the Kestrel web server and static asset delivery that have taken a ton of load away.
Intel are also regularly checking in changes before they release new CPUs now so that the framework is ahead of their releases and takes advantage of new features.
The good thing is that the older techniques to minimize allocations still work, and tools like refs and ref structs make it easier to write zero-allocation code than it used to be.
But it's definitely harder to reason about whether optimizations will 'light up' for code that uses heap-allocated classes, closures, etc. than it was in the past, even if it's harder for a nice reason.
BenchmarkDotNet is a fantastic piece of tech at least, I have found it easier to benchmark in C# than in most other ecosystems I work with.
It is far more guarenteed that that will work in all circumstances than these JIT optimizations, which could have some edge cases where they won't function as expected. If stopwatch allocations were a major concern (as opposed to just feeling like a possible perf bottleneck) then a modern ValueStopwatch struct that consists of two longs (accumulatedDuration, and startTimestamp, which if non-zero means the watch is running) plus calling into the stopwatch static methods is still simple and unambiguous.
But in cases where being low/no allocation is less critical, but your are still concerned about the impacts of the allocations, then these sort of optimizations certainly do help. Plus they even help when you don't really care about allocations, just raw perf, since the optimizations improve raw performance too.
https://endjin.com/blog/2024/11/how-dotnet-9-boosted-ais-dot...
It makes me happy to see MS investing in C# like this. I love the notion of having competing VMed languages.
Coming from the game dev world, I’ve grown more and more convinced that managed languages are the right move for most code. My reasoning is simple: most game developers don’t have the time or patience to deeply understand allocation strategy, span usage, and memory access patterns, even though those are some of the most performance-critical and time-consuming parts of programming to get right.
Managed languages hide a lot of that complexity. Instead of explaining to someone, “you were supposed to use this specialized allocator for your array and make sure your functions were array-view compatible”—something that’s notoriously tedious to guarantee in game engines given how few developers even think about array views—you just let developers write code and most of those problems go away.
I’m not saying everything should be managed. Core engine code should still live in the predictable, statically compiled world. But history shows it can work: projects like Jak and Daxter were written primarily in a custom LISPy scripting language, and even Ryujinx (RIP), the excellent Nintendo Switch emulator, is written entirely in C#.
Another strong technical reason is that managed JIT languages can profile at runtime and keep optimizing call sites based on actual usage patterns. Normally, developers would have to do this by hand or rely on PGO, which works but is painful to set up.
Industry standards make this harder to adopt since platforms like Sony still block JIT, but I think this is the direction we should be moving.
Hmm, no real source for the claim, just a general interest in the two VMs. JVM for work and V8 partially for work. AFAIK, those are two of the VMs that are getting the highest amount of research in due to how they are positioned.
If you want more general information on V8, I suggest reading about the turbofan design docs [1].
The JVM first started doing a lot of these optimizations with Hotspot. Google poached the engineers that did Hotspot and put them to work on V8. That's why the two VMs tend to share similar optimizations.
> I’ve grown more and more convinced that managed languages are the right move for most code.
I tend to agree, to an extent.
The JVM is very fast, but it's also memory hungry and doesn't give up the memory it claims easily. That's due to the nature of the GC algorithms it employs and some historical constraints which bloat object size. One thing you get out of non-gced languages is much lower memory usage and much better live memory density (when done correctly).
[1] https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1sOEF4MlF7LeO7uq-uThJ...
That said, while C# (and the dotnet runtime) are awesome, MS is doing it a disservice lately (poor tooling, Cursor/VSCode controversy etc. etc.) C# could've been so much bigger...
These posts are among the very best, digging into details explaining why things work and why changes were made.
Every time they get released I'm happy because no one killed it...
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen customers immediately “double down” on the size of their servers as a quick fix… and achieving nothing other than increasing their cloud provider’s revenue.
Performance comes from a long series of individually small fixes.
It’s just shocking how much faster vanilla Linux is compared to vanilla windows 11.
Edit: by vanilla Linux I mean out of the box installation of your typical distribution e.g. Ubuntu without any explicit optimisation or tuning for performance
Each distro, platform and desktop manager and related apps are relatively different, though all work pretty well on modern hardware. I'm currently running PopOS COSMIC alpha with the 6.16-4 kernel via mainline. It's been pretty good, though there have been many rough edges regarding keyboard navigation/support in the new apps.
You still need to make sure that everything works, but that's what tests are for, and this has to be checked regardless of your tech stack.
Of course, they had a massive backwards compat break when moving from the regular aspnet to aspnet core, here's hoping nothing like that happens in the next 10-15 years..
With enough experience you can accomplish pretty much everything using just the minimal API and router. HttpContext is the heart of AspNetCore. If you can get your hands on instances of it within the appropriate application context, you can do anything you need to. Everything else is dependent upon this. The chances that HttpContext can be screwed with are very, very low. There are billions of dollars riding on the fact that this type & API remains stable for the next decade+.
Java on the other hand had an implementation of generics that made Container<X> just a Container so you could mix your old containers with generic containers.
Now Java's approach used type erasure and had some limitations, but the C# incompatibility made me suffer every day, that's the cultural difference between Java and a lot of other languages.
It's funny because when I am coding Java and thinking just about Java I really enjoy the type system and rarely feel myself limited by type erasure and when I do I can unerase types easily by
- statically subclassing GenericType<X> to GenericType<ConcreteClass>
- dynamically by adding a type argument to the constructor
- mangling names (say you're writing out stubs to generate code to call a library, you can't use polymorphism to differentiate between
Expression<Result> someMethod(Expression<Integer> x)
Expression<Result> someMethod(Expression<Double> x)
but whenever I spend some time coding hard in a language that doesn't erase generic parameters I come back and I am not in my comfortable Java groove and it hurts.
If you're up for it you should give it another try. Your example of subclassing GenericType<X> and GenericType<ConcreteClass> may be supported with covariance and contravariance in generics [1]. It's probably not very well known among C# developers (vs. basic generics) but it can make some use cases a lot easier.
[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/generics/c...
Correct me if I'm wrong but allowing this would mean the called api might insert objects wholly unrelated to X. This would break every assumption you make about the container's contents. Why would this ever be allowed or wanted?
Microsoft created the ".NET Standard" for this. Literally anything that targets .NET Standard 1.0 should work from circa 2001 through modern day 2025. You still get the (perf) benefits up the runtime upgrade which is what the blog post is about.
What are you looking for out of .NET? The staple packages don't go away as often as in languages like NodeJS
Scott Hanselman has a very short blog on how 20 year old code is upgraded to the latest .NET in just a few short minutes: https://www.hanselman.com/blog/upgrading-a-20-year-old-unive...