Microsoft's .NET development's premier object-oriented language, C# 12, takes a leap forward with the unveiling of its latest preview. The preview bears the mark of a deliberate upgrade that significantly boosts ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation and facilitates access to inline arrays. The new features incorporated into the C# 12 preview, released as part of Visual Studio 17.7 Preview 3 and .NET 8 Preview 6, aim to bolster future performance enhancements.
Intriguingly, the update showcases an innovative experimental feature called Interceptors. This feature enables generators to streamline code rerouting and deliver context-specific optimisations. The objective behind the design of Interceptors is to cater to advanced scenarios, especially those that necessitate enhanced AOT compilation. Dispatched along with .NET 8, this experimental facet of the language may undergo changes or be entirely removed in the future, thereby cautioning users against deploying it in production.
Attributes in the interceptors specify the precise location of the source code. Hence, these are better suited for source generators. Despite their dynamic nature, the interceptors are intended to evolve, in tandem with .NET 8, into a fully-fledged, production-grade C# 12 version by November this year.
Complementing the Interceptors, the latest preview also gives a facelift to the nameof expression. This updated expression can yield the moniker of a variable type or member as a string constant, enhancing its functionality across a wider range of applications. Following the upgrade, this keyword can now work perfectly with initializers, static members, and member names, and within attributes.
The language further makes strides with the introduction of InlineArrayAttribute, a robust feature first introduced within a previous .NET 8 preview. Touted as one of the advanced features, it primarily serves the compiler, .NET libraries, and other libraries. The InlineArrayAttribute helps identify a type that can act as a continuous sequence of primitives, enabling efficient, type-safe, overrun-safe, indexable and sliceable inline data.
This feature is leveraged by .NET libraries to enhance application performance by flagging the type, which can be treated as a continuous sequence of primitives. This action facilitates efficient, type-safe, overrun-safe, indexable, and sliceable inline data.
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