With the release of NET Core 3.0 this year, Microsoft .NET 5 platform, which will be a major improvement in the development system as a whole. The main innovation, in comparison with the .NET Framework 4.8, will be support for Linux, macOS, iOS, Android, tvOS, watchOS and WebAssembly. At the same time, version 4.8 will remain the last, only the Core family will continue to develop.
Development will reportedly focus on Runtime, JIT, AOT, GC, BCL (Base Class Library), C#, VB.NET, F#, ASP.NET, Entity Framework, ML.NET, WinForms, WPF, and Xamarin. This will unify the platform and offer a single open framework and runtime for various tasks. As a result, it will be possible to build applications for different platforms on a common code base with the same build process, regardless of the type of application.
.NET 5 is expected to be released in November 2020 and will become a truly universal development platform. At the same time, the "five" is not the only innovation from Microsoft in the open source business. The company is already Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) of the second version, which should be several times faster than the first, and also be based on a native assembly of the Linux kernel.
Unlike the first version, this is a full-fledged core, not an emulation layer. This approach will speed up boot times, optimize RAM consumption and file system I / O speed, and also provide direct launch of Docker containers.
The most interesting thing is that the company promises not to close the core and provide all the developments on it for the community. In this case, there will be no binding to distributions. Users, as before, can download any image that suits them.