Microsoft Releases .NET 10 RC with Performance Improvements and Benchmarks

Microsoft has released the first release candidate (RC) for .NET 10, accompanied by a ‘go-live’ license for production use. This marks a major milestone for the framework, which focuses heavily on performance optimizations. The release includes significant performance enhancements in areas like JSON processing, compression, Just-In-Time (JIT) compilation, and cryptography. Some of the most notable improvements include a drastic speed boost in thread pool queue management, which now processes time-sensitive tasks 5,000 times faster than in .NET 9, and a 65% speedup in compression and decompression tasks through the new zlib-ng library. Additionally, developers can expect better overall application efficiency without needing to modify their code. ASP.NET Core and Blazor framework have received minor updates, and Entity Framework Core introduces improvements like SQL Server vector search and better support for complex types. However, there is an experimental feature in MAUI that allows developers to replace Mono with CoreCLR on Android, although it’s not intended for production use. Performance tests show that upgrading to .NET 10 provides substantial improvements in server-side performance, with many companies reporting up to a 20% CPU decrease after upgrading. Despite its performance gains, .NET is still often considered less efficient than languages designed to compile to native code, like C or Go. Developers, however, appreciate the stability and performance benefits in real-world applications.