Yes to both.

.NET team has been doubling down on performance improvements, people forget CLR also has features to support C like languages (hence Managed C++ and C++/CLI), and many of those capabilities are now surfaced into C# as well.

Stephen Toub wrote a book-length blog post about all the performance improvements made in .NET 8 [1]. Add the option to compile to native.

[1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/performance-improvemen...

Yeah.

A few highlights, as can be seen in some of the blog posts mentioned by other replies:

- 'Span<T>' to represent chunks of either managed OR unmanaged memory without using unsafe pointers throughout [0][1]

- Not relevant to this task necessarily, but a lot of machinery has been added to allow reuse of objects for tasks like queuing thread pool work, or waiting for an asynchronous result.

- Lots of intrinsics helpers for SIMD workloads, and increased usage of such intrinsics in internal parsers/etc.

- Generally improving a lot of the internal IO to take advantage of other improvements in the runtime.

- PGO (Performance Guided Optimization) on the JIT side, essentially helps with things like better devirt [2] and other improvements.

- AOT compilation, if that's your thing, (I do believe the fastest C# 1BRC submissions use this)

[0] - To be clear, unsafe can still be faster, however for most cases Span is fine and gives you a little more runtime safety.

[1] - You can also grab a Span<T> of a primitive (i.e. int, char) within a method, so long as you don't blow up stack, this is very nice when you need a small buffer for parsing but don't want to thrash the GC or deal with volatile or locks on some sort of pool.

[2] - Devirt historically was a problem in 'call heavy' .NET apps when Interfaces are used, before PGO there was more than one library I worked on where we intentionally used abstract base classes rather than interfaces due to the need to squeeze as much out as we could.