runtimelab VS .NET Runtime

There was a "green thread" experiment for dotnet a while ago, here is the conclusion: https://github.com/dotnet/runtimelab/issues/2398

Experiment result write-up: https://github.com/dotnet/runtimelab/blob/e69dda51c7d796b812...

TLDR: The green threads experiment was a failure as it found (expected and obvious) issues that the Java applications are now getting to enjoy, joining their Go colleagues, while also requiring breaking changes. It, however, gave inspiration to subsequent re-examination of current async/await implementation and whether it can be improved by moving state machine generation and execution away from IL completely to runtime. It was a massive success as evidenced by preliminary overhead estimations in the results.

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...

Unlike these folks from dotnet, which tested directly on ASP for real workload

  https://github.com/dotnet/runtimelab/issues/2398?darkschemeovr=1

[1] https://github.com/dotnet/runtimelab/issues/2398

The only way to avoid it is to not build on top of Java or not adding any features on top of Java.

> To give another example with C#, there has been a lot of recent discussion about finding potential alternatives to their async-await concurrency model. They cite the level of effort it takes to maintain the async await style code and the costs that come from this.

I had a very different take-away. They did PoC with virtual threads and decided it's not worth the switch now and async-await that they have is good enough.

https://github.com/dotnet/runtimelab/issues/2398

> Some of the languages it gets compared too aren't even that old yet.

C# is old enough to drink and Scala just had its 20th birthday this week :)

It was tried and the dotnet team decided to drop it: https://github.com/dotnet/runtimelab/issues/2398

Technical details here: https://github.com/dotnet/runtimelab/blob/feature/green-thre...

Just last month .NET ended a green threading experiment, mainly because the overhead it adds to FFI was too high:

https://github.com/dotnet/runtimelab/issues/2398

Rust had green threads until late 2014, and they were removed because of their impact on performance.

Everyone has done the basic research: green threading is a convenient abstraction that comes with certain performance trade offs. It doesn't work for the kind of profile that Rust is trying to target.

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.

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" } ] }

https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/issues/59591

Support zstd Content-Encoding:

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

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.

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...

Orderby Linq Code Reference

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!)

> The amount of unsafe code used to implement C# vastly outweighs the amount in Rust's standard library.

According to bing.com chat, https://github.com/dotnet/runtime has 3.5M LOC, and https://github.com/rust-lang/rust has 6M LOC. The left panel of https://github.com/dotnet/runtime says 80% of the .NET runtime is written in C#.

This makes me wonder, do you happen to have a link for your “vastly outweighs” statement?