.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

• Features
• API documentation
• Benchmarks
• NuGet Packages

What's new

Release Date: 12-07-2024

DotNext 5.16.1

• Added LEB128 encoder and decoder as a public API. See DotNext.Buffers.Binary.Leb128<T> type for more information
• Added SlideToEnd method to SpanWriter<T> type
• Added IsBitSet and SetBit generic methods to Number type
• Added DetachOrCopyBuffer to BufferWriterSlim<T> type

DotNext.Metaprogramming 5.16.1

• Updated dependencies

DotNext.Unsafe 5.16.1

• Updated dependencies

DotNext.Threading 5.16.1

• Async locks with synchronous acquisition methods now throw LockRecursionException if the current thread tries to acquire the lock synchronously and recursively.
• Added support of cancellation token to synchronous acquisition methods of AsyncExclusiveLock and AsyncReaderWriterLock classes
• Introduced LinkTo method overload that supports multiple cancellation tokens

DotNext.IO 5.16.1

• Introduced RandomAccessStream class that represents Stream wrapper over the underlying data storage that supports random access pattern
• Added extension method for SpanWriter<byte> that provides length-prefixed string encoding

DotNext.Net.Cluster 5.16.1

• Updated dependencies

DotNext.AspNetCore.Cluster 5.16.1

• Updated dependencies

Changelog for previous versions located here.

Release & Support Policy

The libraries are versioned according to 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:

1. All libraries in .NEXT family are available for various .NET form factors: Mono, WASM, NativeAOT
2. Minimal set of dependencies
3. Provide high-quality documentation
4. Stay cross-platform
5. 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.