Posts about CoreCLR

Measuring Performance Improvements in .NET Core with BenchmarkDotNet (Part 1)

Date: June 09, 2017. Tags: .NET C# BenchmarkDotNet benchmarks CoreCLR

A few days ago Stephen Toub published a great post at the Microsoft .NET Blog: Performance Improvements in .NET Core. He showed some significant performance changes in .NET Core 2.0 Preview 1 (compared with .NET Framework 4.7). The .NET Core uses RyuJIT for generating assembly code. When I first tried RyuJIT (e.g., CTP2, CTP5, 2014), I wasn't excited about this: the preview versions had some bugs, and it worked slowly on my applications. However, the idea of a rethought and open-source JIT-compiler was a huge step forward and investment in the future. RyuJIT had been developed very actively in recent years: not only by Microsoft but with the help of the community. I'm still not happy about the generated assembly code in some methods, but I have to admit that the RyuJIT (as a part of .NET Core) works pretty well today: it shows a good performance level not only on artificial benchmarks but also on real user code. Also, there are a lot of changes not only in dotnet/coreclr (the .NET Core runtime), but also in dotnet/corefx (the .NET Core foundational libraries). It's very nice to watch how the community helps to optimize well-used classes which have not changed for years.

Now let's talk about benchmarks. For the demonstration, Stephen wrote a set of handwritten benchmarks. A few people (in comments and on HackerNews) asked about BenchmarkDotNet regarding these samples (as a better tool for performance measurements). So, I decided to try all these benchmarks on BenchmarkDotNet.

In this post, we will discuss how can BenchmarkDotNet help in such performance investigations, which benchmarking approaches (and when) are better to use, and how can we improve these measurements.

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A bug story about named mutex on Mono

Date: February 13, 2017. Tags: .NET Rider Bugs Xplat Mono CoreCLR

When you write some multithreading magic on .NET, you can use a cool synchronization primitive called Mutex:

var mutex = new Mutex(false, "Global\\MyNamedMutex");

You also can make it named (and share the mutex between processes) which works perfectly on Windows:

However, today the .NET Framework is cross-platform, so this code should work on any operation system. What will happen if you use named mutex on Linux or MacOS with the help of Mono or CoreCLR? Is it possible to create some tricky bug based on this case? Of course, it does. Today I want to tell you a story about such bug in Rider which was a headache for several weeks.

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InvalidDataException in Process.GetProcesses

Date: February 10, 2017. Tags: .NET Rider Bugs Xplat CoreCLR

Consider the following program:

public static void Main(string[] args)
{
    try
    {
        Process.GetProcesses();
    }
    catch (Exception e)
    {
        Console.WriteLine(e);
    }
}

It seems that all exceptions should be caught. However, sometimes, I had the following exception on Linux with dotnet cli-1.0.0-preview2:

$ dotnet run
System.IO.InvalidDataException: Found invalid data while decoding.
   at System.IO.StringParser.ParseNextChar()
   at Interop.procfs.TryParseStatFile(String statFilePath, ParsedStat& result, ReusableTextReader reusableReader)
   at System.Diagnostics.ProcessManager.CreateProcessInfo(ParsedStat procFsStat, ReusableTextReader reusableReader)
   at System.Diagnostics.ProcessManager.CreateProcessInfo(Int32 pid, ReusableTextReader reusableReader)
   at System.Diagnostics.ProcessManager.GetProcessInfos(String machineName)
   at System.Diagnostics.Process.GetProcesses(String machineName)
   at System.Diagnostics.Process.GetProcesses()
   at DotNetCoreConsoleApplication.Program.Main(String[] args) in /home/akinshin/Program.cs:line 12

How is that possible?

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