.NEXT

.NEXT (dotNext) is a set of powerful libraries aimed to improve development productivity and extend .NET API with unique features. Some of these features are planned in future releases of .NET platform but already implemented in the library:

Proposal	Implementation
Interop between function pointer and delegate	DelegateHelpers factory methods
Check if an instance of T is default(T)	IsDefault() method
Expression Trees covering additional language constructs, e.g. `foreach`, `await`, patterns, multi-line lambda expressions	Metaprogramming
Async Locks	Documentation
High-performance general purpose Write-Ahead Log	Persistent Log
Memory-mapped file as Memory<byte>	MemoryMappedFileExtensions
Memory-mapped file as ReadOnlySequence<byte>	ReadOnlySequenceAccessor
A dictionary where the keys are represented by generic arguments	Documentation
Process asynchronous tasks as they complete	Documentation
Soft References	Documentation

Quick overview of additional features:

Attachment of user data to an arbitrary objects
Extended set of atomic operations
Fast conversion of bytes to hexadecimal representation and vice versa with Hex class
ManualResetEvent, ReaderWriterLockSlim and other synchronization primitives now have their asynchronous versions
Atomic memory access operations for arbitrary value types
PipeExtensions provides high-level I/O operations for pipelines such as string encoding and decoding
A rich set of high-performance memory buffers for efficient I/O
String formatting, encoding and decoding with low GC pressure: dynamic char buffers
Fully-featured Raft implementation
Fully-featured HyParView implementation

All these things are implemented in 100% managed code on top of existing .NET API.

Quick Links

What's new

Release Date: 01-14-2024

.NEXT 5.0.0 has been released! The primary goal of the new release is migration to .NET 8 to fully utilize its features such as Generic Math and static abstract interface members. 5.x is not fully backward compatible with 4.x because of breaking changes in the API. Most of changes done in DotNext, DotNext.IO, and DotNext.Unsafe libraries. UDP transport for Raft is completely removed in favor of existing TCP implementation. There is a plan to implement multiplexed TCP connection and Raft sharding. New features:

Numeric ranges for LINQ. Thanks to Generic Math
Little-endian and big-endian readers/writer for various buffer types. Again thanks to Generic Math
UTF-8 formatting support for various buffer types

DotNext.Reflection library is deprecated and no longer maintained.

Changelog for previous versions located here.

Release & Support Policy

The libraries are versioned according with Semantic Versioning 2.0.

Version	.NET compatibility	Support Level
0.x	.NET Standard 2.0	❌
1.x	.NET Standard 2.0	❌
2.x	.NET Standard 2.1	❌
3.x	.NET Standard 2.1, .NET 5	❌
4.x	.NET 6	✅
5.x	.NET 8	✔️

❌ - unsupported, ✅ - bug and security fixes only, ✔️ - active development

Development Process

Philosophy of development process:

All libraries in .NEXT family are available for various .NET form factors: Mono, WASM, NativeAOT
Minimal set of dependencies
Provide high-quality documentation
Stay cross-platform
Provide benchmarks

Users

.NEXT is used by several companies in their projects:

Contributing

This project welcomes contributions and suggestions. Most contributions require you to agree to a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) declaring that you have the right to, and actually do, grant us the rights to use your contribution. For details, visit https://cla.microsoft.com.

When you submit a pull request, a CLA-bot will automatically determine whether you need to provide a CLA and decorate the PR appropriately (e.g., label, comment). Simply follow the instructions provided by the bot. You will only need to do this once across all repos using our CLA.

This project has adopted the .NET Foundation Code of Conduct. For more information see the Code of Conduct FAQ or contact conduct@dotnetfoundation.org with any additional questions or comments.