Having a neat clean F# code compiled into a tiny executable is like a dream come true ❤

Wow, that just blew my mind! Amazing content, Nick

Nice, short, clear and simple for understanding! Way to go man!

Love your explanation. Thank you

Very nice! Although there are limitations as you mentioned, this looks great!

Brilliant, just brilliant, thank you for sharing

This is so underdocumented thank you so much for this video!

Love your videos, thanks to this one I hadn't stop talking with friends about about how C# can now run naively without the CLR and JIT. They all respond with "then you don't know what's a managed language" until I pull this video. I think it's a game changer

Very cool. I will try it soon

Very exciting news. About time as well. The limitations it seems should be non issues for many projects.

Nice vid. I have found Avalonia to be a great showcase for startup time improvements in AOT scenarios.

AOT is great! Thanks Nick for sharing. It finally solves self-contained exe's hugh size (with runtime packaged in it).

Mindblowing .NET 7 feature. Waiting to see the a demo on how to use it in AWS Lambas. Thx.

Woah. this is what I been waiting for.

Hi Nick, great video, as usual! Btw. where did you get this awesome-colored console?

Hey Nick, awesome! thanks for bringing this out, on thing to point is as a great AoT advantage is that the code is way more (but not impossible) protected against ILspy, DnSpy or deobfuscation in general. One question tho, is it possible to have a class, with some calculations and stuff generated into native (to have sensitive code protected *unmanaged*) and then use it in as a import of a project and call /use it? Thanks!

This is amazing! To have this option at least as a choice in many cases. And yeah, those limitations with the dynamically loading or generating code that you mention are kinda logical ones, when having no runtime and no jit (but why would you even want to, when the whole perpose of ahead of time compilation was aready to fixate everything from the start). Currently I have already experimented with the existing ReadyToRun feature, which is a partial version of ahead of time compilation, but actually making your binary bigger instead of smaller. :P So great improvement is coming here. I am going to try it. In many cases though, more important to me is that self contained single file option, which is VERY slow at startup, making by far the greatest difference for me. Basically it's kind of a self extracting archive, but a lot of things can be done with that too. Are they considering faster compression algorithms? Because that could be very helpful as well.

Great for cloud native applications

Finally!!! Since I've started the C# course I'm currently part of, and ever since becoming interested in C#, I've always hoped to find a way to build to every architecture natively in order to avoid relying on the end user having the .NET runtime, or having to ship gigantic amounts of supporting files! The amount of performance optimization that can be done here is most likely a good chunk, and I can't wait to see what this AoT option evolves to!

I guess will have to wait for that aws lambda video. Thanks for great content 🙏🏼

This is actually great, depending on the project of course, if you're already using those limitations of dynamic code gen, reflection etc, you're not going to care that much. But if you're on a 'proper' microservice architecture or even a well decoupled one, this is really useful. dotNet is getting more competitive in the right ways every day.

Very cool. Please update this when it is production ready.

nice, thanks

Very interesting. Comming from Commodore 64, Amiga, all native machinecode and then forward through C/C++, then now... C# and... Docker... and now we can get back to natively compiled code... I still love .NET for its scalability, but cool to know we can also bake and compile our code

This is the best C# news ever !!!

very interesting. i've always liked C#, having to carry around so much baggage (and expect target machines to have certain files installed) with every app had me go to another language. this will convince me to take another look at C# in the coming months.

This is great! Now what we need is a lightweight web server and framework that doesn't rely on reflection. I'm not a fan of ASP, so I would have wanted that either way - but maybe now there's a more compelling reason to do it? 😄

Thanks a lot for this video! Does it work if code contains reflection? Are there any other restrictions?

Cool. Expect to see it in AWS lambdas

Awesome🎉, looking forward those changers could be adopt into Azure Webapp

Hey, that's pretty good

This seems like it could be a real benefit to WebAssembly/Blazor Client Side. I can imagine the limitations, even the current trimming features often cause me issues, but even as it is now, I think this will be really useful for us in a few cases.

Oh my god! I always wanted that!

definitely cool

I have waiting this moment for years. I waiting it from when it was called CoreRT.

Hi Nick, great video, the binary size reduction is crazy. Now I really want to see a video of how NativeAOT works under the hood, especially memory management.

I tried AoT native compilation pre-Net 5 (iirc) and it was nice but wouldn't reliably work. Looks like it's still in much the same place but at least it's getting officially included in the runtime which is something. Definitely something to think about if you're running in containers.

We already have a usecase for this, on Unity, it is hard to download files from e.g. an object storage asynchronous and multiple at the same time. So we came up with a native plugin, written in net7, which we DL to from mono in Unity. Works perfectly lol

Great video nick! How is garbage collection working when in AOT. Is it included in the 2mb file size?

It's great for dockerized command line apps

Already use this feature since NET5

Does that affect Attributes, since attributes often make use of reflection to work?

This is probably for Unitys upgrade to CoreCLR... pretty cool!

Great stuff. Can Native AOT be used to create micro services / minimal API apps with MapGet?

Thanks for the video , I am new in c# , do you have any tutorials / courses that show how to create Apis in c# and deploy the final app to linux cloud ?

Can you talk about the hybrid mode? As far as I understand there is an AOT mode where dynamically loaded code is supported, however it actually runs using an interpreter (the eval is running off of IL directly). I'm really curious about the internals and details of that approach.

I would love to watch the AOT Lambda video.

Great to see that this is coming to official C# as well. Unity engine had their own implementation trough IL2CPP for quite a while and Mono had AOT to some extent as well. Question: So reflection emitting does not work, kind of expected, but I would be extremely impressed if they somehow made it work, but does regular reflection (eg. setting private fields, etc.) work? Could it in theory work faster?

Coooooool, hope this come to webapis

I wish there was an option to compile a C# application for bare-metal embedded systems.

I would think that there are more substantial performance benefits for larger libraries and some apps? Particularly for start up, memory, and protection from de-compilation. Something I am interested if following.

I dived into this a couple years ago because I finally was thinking I was going to get c++ performance (the only real thing I missed when I moved from C++ to c# like a decade ago). It the .net native turned out it was not any faster... pretty much exactly what Nick was getting.

If my program depends on a static file, can I bundle that somehow in that executable file too? Or do I have to put that file separately?

C# native will still have more safeguards to prevent any dangerous errors, it's still garbage collected and it's still primarily heap based. This makes C# a delight to program in, but it also limits how much you can optimize your code on the low level. On the other hand, C# has automatic memory pools which makes heap allocations faster in C# than, for example C++. C++ is propably faster overall but it's not usually that much faster unless you think about the performance. Though C++ allows for more deeper optimizations which makes it run circles around C#, in those cases however you'll be writing much more custom code and thinking about CPU cache lines. So far my experiences are... C# is easy and fast to use. C++ anywhere from medium easy to absolute nightmare depending what you're doing and how much you care about performance. C++ doesn't really have a centralized ecosystem of libraries so you may end up spending a lot of time finding the stuff you need or programming it yourself. It's really about a tradeoff between how much time you're willing to spend programming to make the application spend less time executing. I usually prefer C++ as I find it more interesting and closer to the metal, but I also like the relative simplicity of C#. I haven't used Go, or Rust yet but I can definitely see the appeal.

Hey Nick, can you make a video on the purpose of .pdb files and how to use them, please?

Is there any reason to NOT use the AOT for traditional desktop applications or DLLs? This looks really promising.

Can't wait to see it running in a lambda function

This will be very nice for containers as soon as it's stable etc.! I have a question, though: Does this also mean, that the attack surfice is lower? I mean, it's all machine code so decompilation is not as good/fast as with JITed code, right?

PublishSingleFile works well for me (I ignore the giant EXEs!), unless I need to use mysql. The Mysql client uses the 'Codebase' property in reflection which apparently does not get populated in PublishSingleFile mode

Electron apps face the same issue, without having a framework preinstalled on the local machine each application must contain everything to run which makes each project unnecessarily large. I'm hoping at some point web browsers adopt the ability to install DLL's which can be used by any site so that we can get away from having to use JS to interact with the DOM. Assuming Blazor takes hold maybe we can work towards Wasm's being cacheable for all domains.

Or Swift, which I created a whole shipping iOS app in but had to turn away from to go multiplatform.

It's cool for containers, lambdas, and game engines.

Would have been cool to compare the startup time too. Even something very simple like a bash script that records the time, runs the exe, prints out the duration.

Hey man, how about write the exact same thing in C/C++ or Delphi and compare perf and memory footprint? Because it's norm for me to pick a native code language when anything with client-side high performance is concerned.

Why we had to wait for .NET 7 for this remains a complete mystery.

Can't wait for the Lambda examples.

Previous self-contained compilation was the NGEN?

Forgive me if the question is silly. Would it be possible to load PHP core library (written in C) into C# and build extensions with it? Or maybe with a PHP-CPP intermediary layer library?

Without supporting reflection.emit, does that mean EF lazy loading is out?

This is cool. Unity will most likely take advantage of this and replace it's il2cpp tool :)

Ouch, that platform-specific headache... Not again :)

Imagine if you could AOT compile your c# program with clang -O3 and avx2 this would be nuts

What is the execution time with PGO? That is probably faster than AOT

Now when starting a new project in VS. When you choose .NET 8; You can choose to use the Aot into native by default in a checkbox. So when you open your project file. It has the true in it already. This doesn't apply for .NET 7 or earlier.

for small container? :D

Surprised it doesn't run way faster, does it not get optimized by the compiler or something? Like with LLVM. Asking because in Unity, we use C# and they have what's called a burst compiler, which converts C# code to native application code and it makes a huge difference like x100 to x10,000 faster.(it also sets some strict coding restrictions to enable far better memory management).

Does AOT Native built app work on Windows XP x86 as well?

Aot compiling dont supported for ASP .Net Core projects? Only for console?

love when they release some real "hhnnnnnghhh"-features

I wonder if this could be used on a Raspberry Pi - the small footprint

hi, im trying to register on your web page for some on your courses, but i really dont see that option : (, only login. thx

How does the AoT mix with things like Reflection? The reduction in size is really amazing, but I guess a lot of information is lost in the process

Do you know how Unity compiles for iOS? I recall it compiles your C# code AOT but according to what you said it should not yet be possible. I must be missing something.

Can we convert windows forms into intermediate language? I'm guessing not lmk

It's not exactly new feature. Compiling C# to native code was available for a quite some time, but limited to UWP with something called .NET Native. It was (is?) amazing. I was building an app for Windows 10 IoT Core on Raspberry Pi 3 and the difference between JIT and AOT was huugeeee... like 30 seconds difference in startup. For AOT version startup took few seconds, and for JIT it was +30 seconds. I'm happy that they managed to go with it beyond UWP

Do you know how intrinsics are handled? Is there a way to target certain instructions (SSE, AVX, etc.)?

Hi Nick, Will DIE show the app as .Net app (which it should I guess) and at 7:22 what is that 2nd AOTApp process taking 84.6MB?

the single file option is only slow on the first run when it unpacks the file. after that it's fast.

I wonder what it does if you depend on some NuGet package that uses features that are not compatible with AOT. Does it just throw a build error, or is there a chance that it will build anyway and then do something weird at runtime? Is there a way to scan the dependencies to see which ones are not compatible? For what it's worth, I rewrote this example code in Rust (because of course I did) and it took about 2.8s to run with the same input, which is pretty close, although I don't know if your processor is faster or slower than mine, so not that meaningful. But the exe is only 290KB and only uses 100KB of RAM, so there's that.

Does AOT apps have GC and if not how are strings cleanup?

Would it ever be able to use rust code for libraries to get the speed I need?

You should know that the AOT option can't really compete with C or Rust, when it comes to speed, start up time, RAM usage and binary size (while actual numbers depend on the use case). If your target has such constraints and your knowlegde of memory management & optimization techniques is profound enough, you can consider using a language that was designed to compile to native machine code in the first place. C# gives you memory management and platform independence for free. Needless to say performance optimizations which you also get for free with almost every major release without changing your code. The AOT option is actually great, if you need to run your application on systems which do not allow JIT (like iOS & game consoles). It is actually crazy that this works at all, albeit being limited on some features. I thought, I leave this here as an addition to the comparison with other languages at the beginning of the video. :)

What about Web Assembly? BlazorWA loads lots of dll, can this technique reduce number of dll therefore reduce the size of WA page?

Is it smaller, yes, but it still seems large for such a tiny bit of code compiled to native instructions. I remember fitting several C++ compiled applications, on a single 1.44MB floppy disk back in my high school days.

Haven't they been announcing AOT for Blazor/ WASM too? I tried it once, it took very long to compile… and finally didn't work.

We need winforms support.

This looks cool. But I'm still waiting for when I'll be able to run .NET UI apps in Linux. One can only dream... As usual, thank you for the informative video! :)

Does it compile a mini garbage collector within the executable?

I've installed .net 8 and it's not possibile that I cannot find a compiler for c# 12 in the stuff I've installed, where is it? Not the old csc.exe for c#5 from the windows directory

Does NativeAOT always static link DLLs or is dynamic linking also possible? Dynamic linking is needed in some cases like: 1. Licensing issues: A library licensed under GNU LGPL cannot be used, because it has to be linked dynamically. 2. Updating parts of the software: You can update DLLs very easy, but with a full self contained app, you always have to update the entire appfile instead of a single DLL.