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C# 10 Features

Published by marco on

Updated by marco on

The article Introducing C# 10 by Ken Bonny discloses some incremental but very welcome changes to the C# language in the iteration that will be released with .NET 6 in November.

In no particular order:

  • field in property accesses to manipulate the backing property without having to define it. This is a welcome improvement that will clean up useless boilerplate for properties that need to do something with the value before storing it (e.g. field.Trim())
  • The required keyword for properties in any of the supported types (e.g. records, classes, structs, or struct records). This lets types enforce initialization without forcing a constructor parameter. The compiler will force callers to initialize the property in the object initializer instead.
  • record struct for records that are value instead of reference types
  • operator overloads in records
  • The with operator will work with anonymous classes as well as declared types.
  • global usings for commonly used namespaces (e.g. System) to cut down on clutter in files
  • namespace without braces will put all types in that file into that namespace. This cuts down on an indenting level in all files.
  • Improvements to lambdas: attributes on parameters and return types, explicit return types
  • Static methods on interfaces (to round out the default-implementation feature introduced in C# 9)
  • Constant interpolated strings (e.g. $”Hello {Name}” is considered constant if Name is also considered constant (recursively, of course). Update on November 11th, 2021 from Dissecting Interpolated Strings Improvements in C# 10 by Sergey Teplyakov (Dissecting the Code): This feature is based on an a nice performance improvement, as well. The compiler now understands interpolated strings and emits more efficient code rather than always using string.Format(), which incurred allocations for unboxing, time for parsing, etc. There are even attributes to hook the compiler output that could be e.g, “used by logging frameworks to avoid string creation if the logging level is off.”
  • Update on June 7th, 2021 from A Closer Look at 5 New Features in C# 10 by Matthew MacDonald (Medium): Introduce !! suffix for method arguments that instructs the compiler to generated a null-check for that argument. So, string is not nullable, but not checked (i.e. the developer is responsible for including a check to avoid a NullReferenceException if one slips past the compiler), string? is nullable, and string!! is not nullable and checked. This will avoid a ton of boilerplate argument-checks. Can’t wait.
  • Update on November 4th, 2021 from A quick review of C# 10 new language features by Thomas Levesque: The compiler will now “[a]utomatically infer a “natural” type for a lambda”, so you can now use var to declare variable to which you assign a manifest lambda. E.g. var isEven = (int n) => n % 2 == 0; automatically gets the type Func< int, bool>.
  • Also from the same November 4th article: You can now “[m]ix declarations and variables in deconstruction” so that you can now write (x3, int y3) = p; where x3 is a preexisting variable.

I really appreciate how the changes build on changes that came in previous versions. There’s a very noticeable direction that they’re pulling in with these languages changes:

  • Being able to write performant code (records, refs, etc.)
  • Cutting down on boilerplate for common use cases (records, field, pattern-matching. etc.)
  • Being able to write maintainable, backwards-compatible code (interface default methods, etc.)
  • Improving type system (covariant returns, etc.)
  • Turning runtime issues into compile-time issues (nullability, etc.)

For more information, see the csharplang/proposals/ (GitHub) folder. Some of the C# 10 features are in the main folder rather in the csharp-10.0/ folder.