Efficiency of C# on Linux

This week I attended Mads Torgersen’s talk Why you should take another look at C#. Afterward, I asked him about the efficiency of C# on Linux. When I last looked into it, it wasn’t good. A few years ago I asked someone on my team to try running some C# software on Linux using Mono. The code worked correctly, but it ran several times slower than on Windows.

Mads said that now with .NET Core, C# code runs about as fast on Linux as Windows. Maybe a few percent slower on Linux. Scott Hanselman joined the conversation and explained that with .NET Core, the same code runs on every platform. The Mono project duplicated the much of the functionality of the .NET framework, but it was an entirely independent implementation and not as efficient.

I had assumed the difference was due to compiler optimizations or lack thereof, but Scott and Mads said that the difference was mostly the code implementation. There are some compiler optimizations that are better on the Windows side, and so C# might run a little faster on Windows, but the performance is essentially the same on both platforms.

I could recommend C# to a client running Linux if there’s a 5% performance penalty, but a 500% performance penalty was a show-stopper. Now I’d consider using C# on a project where I need more performance than Python or R, but wanted to use something easier to work with than C++.

Years ago I developed software with the Microsoft stack, but I moved away from Microsoft tools when I quit doing the kind of software development the tools are geared for. So I don’t write C# much any more. It’s been about a year since I had a project where I needed to write C# code. But I like the C# language. You can tell that a lot of thought has gone into the design, and the tool support is great. Now that the performance is better on Linux I’d consider using it for numerical simulations.