.Net Core 2.0 to extend coding optimizations to Linux

The next version of Microsoft’s open source, cross-platform version of the .Net software platform, .Net Core 2.0, will bring profile-guided optimization (PGO) to Linux x64. PGO is native compilation technology used by the C++ compiler to generate faster-running code. 

PGO features a two-step process, including a training run that records information about execution and a build step that uses the results of the training run to generate better optimized code, Microsoft’s Bertrand Le Roy and Daniel Podder explained in a blog post. The .Net Core 2.0 upgrade will add PGO optimizations to .Net Core on both the Windows x86 and Linux x64 platforms. PGO began working with Windows x64 in the .Net Core 1.1 release and it has been used in the Windows-based .Net Framework for years.

Fragmentation in the Linux ecosystem, with different compiler tool chains across distros, makes PGO harder to do on Linux than on Windows, Le Roy and Podder note. “A simplifying factor on Linux is that we’re now building a unique ‘Linux’ version of .Net, that we’re then packaging into native installers and tarballs,” they wrote. “This made it possible to apply the PGO optimizations to all the distributions that consume those common bits with reduced complexity.” Mozilla, for its part, also has enabled use of PGO in its own build system for the Firefox browser.

.Net Core 2.0 currently is in a preview stage. PGO applies only to internal, native-compiled components of the runtime and JIT compilation, so .Net Core users do not need to take action to realize the benefits. All managed applications automatically get the benefit of PGO. Benefits will vary based on the application. “In this release, we’ve applied those optimizations to the native parts of the runtime, based on profiling data from typical .NET applications,” Le Roy and Podder wrote. “In a future release, we’re planning on applying similar optimizations to the managed components of the Net. Core stack.”