.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
Concept Types	Documentation
Expression Trees covering additional language constructs, i.e. `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

Quick overview of additional features:

Attachment of user data to an arbitrary objects
Extended set of atomic operations. Inspired by AtomicInteger and friends from Java
Fast Reflection
Fast conversion of bytes to hexadecimal representation and vice versa using ToHex and FromHex methods from Span static class
ManualResetEvent, ReaderWriterLockSlim and other synchronization primitives now have their asynchronous versions
Atomic memory access operations for arbitrary value types including enums
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 without modifications of Roslyn compiler or CoreFX libraries.

Quick Links

What's new

Release Date: 12-20-2021

DotNext 4.1.3

Smallish performance improvements

DotNext.Metaprogramming 4.1.3

Updated dependencies

DotNext.Reflection 4.1.3

Updated dependencies

DotNext.Unsafe 4.1.3

Performance improvements of Pointer<T> public methods

DotNext.Threading 4.1.3

Fixed potential concurrency issue than can be caused by AsyncBridge public methods when cancellation token or wait handle is about to be canceled or signaled

DotNext.IO 4.1.3

Updated dependencies

DotNext.Net.Cluster 4.1.3

Updated dependencies

DotNext.AspNetCore.Cluster 4.1.3

Updated dependencies

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	Not Supported
1.x	.NET Standard 2.0	Not Supported
2.x	.NET Standard 2.1	Not Supported
3.x	.NET Standard 2.1, .NET 5	Maintenance
4.x	.NET 6	Active development

Maintenance support level means that new releases will contain bug fixes only.

Development Process

Philosophy of development process:

All libraries in .NEXT family are available for the wide range of .NET runtimes: Mono, .NET, Blazor
Compatibility with R2R/AOT compiler should be checked for every release
Minimize set of dependencies
Provide high-quality documentation
Stay cross-platform
Provide benchmarks

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.