referencesource VS .NET Runtime

Compare referencesource vs .NET Runtime and see what are their differences.

referencesource

Source from the Microsoft .NET Reference Source that represent a subset of the .NET Framework (by microsoft)

.NET Runtime

.NET is a cross-platform runtime for cloud, mobile, desktop, and IoT apps. (by dotnet)
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referencesource .NET Runtime
88 606
3,103 14,047
0.7% 2.2%
0.0 10.0
20 days ago 6 days ago
C# C#
MIT License MIT License
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

referencesource

Posts with mentions or reviews of referencesource. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-05-30.
  • Got my first c# software engineering job, any advice?
    1 project | /r/dotnet | 14 Jun 2023
    But to go deeper to .NET/CLR architecture is important too. Try to understand how it works inside. Use the source, Luke! https://source.dot.net/ https://referencesource.microsoft.com/ This source code vaults is not completed then try JetBrains dotPeek tool to look at any assembly source code.
  • The most obscure type in the System namespace
    1 project | /r/dotnet | 11 Jun 2023
    (https://github.com/Microsoft/referencesource/blob/master/System.ServiceModel/System/ServiceModel/MessageSecurityVersion.cs; scroll down to inner classes)
  • Why your F# evangelism isn't working
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 30 May 2023
    List is an IList/IReadOnlyList; these interfaces do nothing that couldn't be done right inside the file itself.

    https://referencesource.microsoft.com/#mscorlib/system/colle...

    https://referencesource.microsoft.com/#mscorlib/system/colle...

    Instead we have to go diving through the IList, which implements ICollection, which implements IEnumerable, which implements IEnumerable (again). Just because each interface is composed of another interface, doesn't mean you aren't using inheritance. You are effectively creating a custom inheritance tree through willy-nilly composition.

    It is gratuitous to make this chain so deep, when the underlying code is just a handful of lines.

    https://referencesource.microsoft.com/#mscorlib/system/colle...

    https://referencesource.microsoft.com/#mscorlib/system/colle...

    https://referencesource.microsoft.com/#mscorlib/system/colle...

    ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    The doc-strings are unnecessary. It's self-evident what most of the code does if you read it.

            // Returns an enumerator for this list with the given
  • How do I counter "Open source is less secure due to vulnerabilities being open too."?
    1 project | /r/opensource | 25 May 2023
    The whole .net framework source code is online.
  • Difference between String and StringBuilder in C#.
    1 project | /r/csharp | 7 May 2023
  • Best way to create two operators that differ only by one argument type and have the same numbers of arguments?
    1 project | /r/csharp | 13 Mar 2023
    https://github.com/microsoft/referencesource/blob/master/System.Numerics/System/Numerics/Vector2.cs https://github.com/microsoft/referencesource/blob/master/System.Numerics/System/Numerics/Vector2_Intrinsics.cs
  • Multi-Key Dictionary in C#
    2 projects | /r/dotnet | 31 Jan 2023
    .net itself has arbitrary interfaces, ex https://github.com/microsoft/referencesource/blob/master/mscorlib/system/action.cs
  • Ask HN: What book you recommend for advanced programming in C#?
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 30 Jan 2023
    Assuming if you are new to C# - start coding! And start reading https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/tour-of-csha...

    If you are not new to C#, start building an application end-to-end/a classic n-tier application, right from using a database, Entity Framework, WebAPI, DTO, AutoMapper, and a front-end (your choice - Angular/React/Vue with TypeScript or better yet - Blazor).

    You will not only understand & use dependency injection, reflection, LINQ, multi-threaded programming, generic programming, source-code generation, unit-testing - and much much more in a practical/real-world usage.

    Peruse https://referencesource.microsoft.com/ once in a while.

    Follow various team members of .NET Framework, C# team and the like on various social-media. https://mobile.twitter.com/i/lists/120961876

    I am sure there will be who agree / disagree with the above approach and will provide more viewpoints for you to consider.

    Enjoy - and strap yourself for an amazing journey or roller-coaster ride, however you want to call it!

  • FTP Web Request Question
    1 project | /r/csharp | 23 Jan 2023
    Maybe from the source of FtpWebRequest it is possible to track what the default behaviour is.
  • Get MimeType for .NET 6.0 Windows Forms program
    1 project | /r/csharp | 19 Nov 2022
    The class is just a very limited dictionary, a library will be the same or better.

.NET Runtime

Posts with mentions or reviews of .NET Runtime. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-04-22.
  • The Performance Impact of C++'s `final` Keyword
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 22 Apr 2024
    Yes, that is true. I'm not sure about JVM implementation details but the reason the comment says "virtual and interface" calls is to outline the difference. Virtual calls in .NET are sufficiently close[0] to virtual calls in C++. Interface calls, however, are coded differently[1].

    Also you are correct - virtual calls are not terribly expensive, but they encroach on ever limited* CPU resources like indirect jump and load predictors and, as noted in parent comments, block inlining, which is highly undesirable for small and frequently called methods, particularly when they are in a loop.

    * through great effort of our industry to take back whatever performance wins each generation brings with even more abstractions that fail to improve our productivity

    [0] https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr/blob/4895a06c/src/vm/amd64...

    [1] https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/blob/main/docs/design/core... (mind you, the text was initially written 18 ago, wow)

  • Java 23: The New Features Are Officially Announced
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Apr 2024
    If you care about portable SIMD and performance, you may want to save yourself trouble and skip to C# instead, it also has an extensive guide to using it: https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/blob/69110bfdcf5590db1d32c...

    CoreLib and many new libraries are using it heavily to match performance of manually intensified C++ code.

  • Locally test and validate your Renovate configuration files
    4 projects | dev.to | 9 Apr 2024
    DEBUG: packageFiles with updates (repository=local) "config": { "nuget": [ { "deps": [ { "datasource": "nuget", "depType": "nuget", "depName": "Microsoft.Extensions.Hosting", "currentValue": "7.0.0", "updates": [ { "bucket": "non-major", "newVersion": "7.0.1", "newValue": "7.0.1", "releaseTimestamp": "2023-02-14T13:21:52.713Z", "newMajor": 7, "newMinor": 0, "updateType": "patch", "branchName": "renovate/dotnet-monorepo" }, { "bucket": "major", "newVersion": "8.0.0", "newValue": "8.0.0", "releaseTimestamp": "2023-11-14T13:23:17.653Z", "newMajor": 8, "newMinor": 0, "updateType": "major", "branchName": "renovate/major-dotnet-monorepo" } ], "packageName": "Microsoft.Extensions.Hosting", "versioning": "nuget", "warnings": [], "sourceUrl": "https://github.com/dotnet/runtime", "registryUrl": "https://api.nuget.org/v3/index.json", "homepage": "https://dot.net/", "currentVersion": "7.0.0", "isSingleVersion": true, "fixedVersion": "7.0.0" } ], "packageFile": "RenovateDemo.csproj" } ] }
  • Chrome Feature: ZSTD Content-Encoding
    10 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Apr 2024
    https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/issues/59591

    Support zstd Content-Encoding:

  • Writing x86 SIMD using x86inc.asm (2017)
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Mar 2024
  • Why choose async/await over threads?
    11 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 25 Mar 2024
    We might not be that far away already. There is this issue[1] on Github, where Microsoft and the community discuss some significant changes.

    There is still a lot of questions unanswered, but initial tests look promising.

    Ref: https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/issues/94620

  • Redis License Changed
    11 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 20 Mar 2024
    https://github.com/dotnet/dotnet exists for source build that stitches together SDK, Roslyn, runtime and other dependencies. A lot of them can be built and used individually, which is what contributors usually do. For example, you can clone and build https://github.com/dotnet/runtime and use the produced artifacts to execute .NET assemblies or build .NET binaries.
  • Garnet – A new remote cache-store from Microsoft Research
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 18 Mar 2024
    Yeah, it kind of is. There are quite a few of experiments that are conducted to see if they show promise in the prototype form and then are taken further for proper integration if they do.

    Unfortunately, object stack allocation was not one of them even though DOTNET_JitObjectStackAllocation configuration knob exists today, enabling it makes zero impact as it almost never kicks in. By the end of the experiment[0], it was concluded that before investing effort in this kind of feature becomes profitable given how a lot of C# code is written, there are many other lower hanging fruits.

    To contrast this, in continuation to green threads experiment, a runtime handled tasks experiment[1] which moves async state machine handling from IL emitted by Roslyn to special-cased methods and then handling purely in runtime code has been a massive success and is now being worked on to be integrated in one of the future version of .NET (hopefully 10?)

    [0] https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/issues/11192

    [1] https://github.com/dotnet/runtimelab/blob/feature/async2-exp...

  • Common Sorting Algorithms in C# - From My Experience
    1 project | dev.to | 2 Mar 2024
    Orderby Linq Code Reference
  • The Mechanics of Silicon Valley Pump and Dump Schemes
    8 projects | dev.to | 18 Feb 2024
    The math of the above is really simple. Microsoft has 13,000 stars on their GitHub profile for their flagship product. SupaBase has 63,000 stars on their GitHub project for their flagship product. 27% of all software developers in the world are using .Net. SupaBase has 4.5 times as many likes as the .Net Core runtime, so they must be 4.5 times as large, right? 4.5 multiplied by 27% becomes 130%. Implying 130% of all software developers that exists on earth are using SupaBase (apparently!)

What are some alternatives?

When comparing referencesource and .NET Runtime you can also consider the following projects:

ASP.NET Core - ASP.NET Core is a cross-platform .NET framework for building modern cloud-based web applications on Windows, Mac, or Linux.

Ryujinx - Experimental Nintendo Switch Emulator written in C#

github1s - One second to read GitHub code with VS Code.

CoreCLR - CoreCLR is the runtime for .NET Core. It includes the garbage collector, JIT compiler, primitive data types and low-level classes.

actix-web - Actix Web is a powerful, pragmatic, and extremely fast web framework for Rust.

CoreWCF - Main repository for the Core WCF project

WASI - WebAssembly System Interface

ILSpy - .NET Decompiler with support for PDB generation, ReadyToRun, Metadata (&more) - cross-platform!

csharplang - The official repo for the design of the C# programming language

vgpu_unlock - Unlock vGPU functionality for consumer grade GPUs.