.NET 8: Standalone .NET Apps Now 50% Smaller On Linux

Photo: © Malik Nalik / Adobe Stock

.NET 8 shows more love for Linux, JSON and Apple devices to attract wider range of C# developers

.NET 8, a Microsoft framework to build cross platform apps was released last month.

It comes with a lot of changes. I love that it has really strong support for JSON compared to the efforts made years ago to promote XML.

For example .NET 8 can serialize a hierarchy of interfaces:

IDerived value = new DerivedImplement { Base = 0, Derived = 1 };
JsonSerializer.Serialize(value); // {"Base":0,"Derived":1}

public interface IBase
{
    public int Base { get; set; }
}

public interface IDerived : IBase
{
    public int Derived { get; set; }
}

public class DerivedImplement : IDerived
{
    public int Base { get; set; }
    public int Derived { get; set; }
}

For performance wise operstions I welcome the support for 512 bit vector operstions on Intel processors.

It also supports SHA3 hash primitives, HTTPS proxies and can zip a directory of files to a stream.

But what is the star of the release is are the improvements to something called native AOT.