Microsoft has unveiled the sixth preview of its planned .NET 9, a major release of the company’s cross-platform software development framework that brings improvements in areas ranging from code layout to System.Numerics. With .NET 9, the ASP.NET web framework introduces fingerprinting of static web assets, which promises to improve caching behavior and enable faster load times.
Downloadable from dotnet.microsoft.com, .NET 9 Preview 6 was introduced July 15. Code layout improvements stem from the refactoring of the RyuJIT compiler’s flowgraph data structures to remove various restrictions around block ordering and to ingrain execution likelihoods into every control flow change between blocks. Also, investments have been made into ensuring profile data is propagated and maintained as the method’s flowgraph is transformed. This has enabled RyuJIT’s block reordering algorithm to be replaced with a simpler, more global approach, according to Microsoft.
System.Numerics.BigInteger, which supports representing integer values of essentially arbitrary length, adds an enforced maximum length for BigInteger, which can be no more than (2^31) – 1 (approximately 2.14 billion) bits. The new limit ensures that all APIs are well-behaved and consistent while still allowing numbers far beyond most usage scenarios. System.Diagnostics.Metrics now features a Gauge instrument, which is designed to record non-additive values when changes occur. This can, for example, measure the background noise level, where summing the values from multiple rooms would be nonsensical. The Gauge instrument is a generic type that can record any value type, such as int, double, or decimal.